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2.0étoiles sur 5
Not a very good book...., Mai 27 2004
It's very easy to see just how old this book really is and just how narrow Mr. Blish's views are. He dreamed too small. Cities in flight? Why cities? I can't imagine a group of people who when suddenly given the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy (and outside it for that matter) would collectively say "Let's take our cities with us!" The politics at the begriming of the story are strongly anti-communist and at the time it was written may have spurred patriotism in the reader but in the present time it adds nothing to the book.Anachronisms abound in this book. People can't remember being children but still use 'gone the way of the dodo' to represent extinction. Are we really supposed to believe that in (from the time of the writing) over two THOUSAND years people will still remember a small, flightless bird that died out? Vacuum tubes are still in use in computers? None but the 'most powerful' computers can speak? People in 4004 facing the end of existence as we know it still use slide rules? When people packed up their cities and decided to move from planet to planet to find work they also seem to have forgotten to bring cars, planes or other modes of transportation that will work outside the cities. They brought no livestock. They farmed no crops. They have no arts. The characters of the book are, for the most part, flat and one dimensional. No one expresses any interest in anything outside of the story line. No one apparently even listens to music or enjoys ANY form of entertainment. The stories have a rather juvenile feeling to them as if they were written for younger readers, Except for the pages and pages of incomprehensible mathematics and scientific ideas that make little or no sense. The ending of the book has a very 'hurry up and get it over with feeling'. "Here come the bad guys!", "Oh, they're defeated, Hurrah!" I found this book in a 'Top 50 science fiction & fantasy books' list and still can't understand how it got there. It just wasn't that good a read and ends very disappointingly.
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