Customer Reviews

Thunder Rift

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Matthew Farrell's idea-packed and beautifully written "Thunder Rift" is a survey-team story with a baroquely neurotic postmodernist heroine. His Taria Spears rejects intimacy, disobeys orders, antognizes nearly everyone she meets, but . . . well, wait for it.

The premise is simple: a wormhole, "the thunder," appears near Jupiter, and the survey team is sent through it to discover another gas-giant planet that has a life-supporting satellite upon which live the curious "Blues." These critters are hopelessly myopic and their primary sense is hearing (the author does a marvellous job of depicting what a hearing-based society, language, art, and architecture might be like), but it seems unlikely they could be the ones responsible for constructing the wormhole. Taria thinks otherwise.

The rulebound survey team, composed primarily of military personnel (although Taria and a few others are civilians) meets virtually with blue representatives and eventually (and reluctantly) the powers that be on the survey team send Taria to the surface (for a postmodernist tale it's surprising how 1950s Farrell makes the hidebound survey-team officers--they could have been created by one of John W. Campbell's "Analog" mag. writers of the 1950s). Taria, of course, finds things are not what they seem, at which point the tale gets a kick start and moves on to its swift conclusion.

Notes and asides: Farrell anticipates certain objections readers might have and tosses in an appendix to deal with them, and you get the sense that an editor insisted upon this. With more time (and skill--this is apparently Farrell's first novel) the details listed there could have been worked into the main story. And whatever did happen to Ensign Coen? Did I miss something?

When I first picked this book up, I was looking forward to a wild, fun and (dare I say it) shallow sci-fi romp through space and alien encounter. What I got was that, yes, in very small quantities, and about two hundred pages too many on an alien society not interesting enough to write twenty pages on. There are a few moments that are awe-inspiring, but the fact is nothing in this book is incredibly original or fresh. Whenever an exciting idea comes along, it is weighed down by a lot of lovey-dovey irrelevance. So if you're like me and don't want your Arthur C. Clarke being distracted by V.C. Andrews, then skip this one.

Some of the language and sexuality in the book was not totally necessary and did not add to the overall arc of the story nor did it serve to flesh-out the characters. Also, how many times did I have to read about her tragic experience in China? Also, the setup was too obvious and aside from the final twist at the end, nothing was a surprise. On the positive side, though, the issues of culture, reality, and perception are all EXTREMELY well developed and explored. Sometimes Mr. Farrell beats you over the head with the message when a simple phrase would do, but all in all, this book was a good, quick read. It took me a little less than a day to read, but it's been with me for several days now, which is always a good sign.

Not a bad book, not a great book. Just decent.

The basic idea is a ship full of soldiers and scientists exploring a nearby region of space. The soldiers are predictably aggressive and paranoid, and the scientists are incredibly uninterested in the first contact with an alien culture. (Once they determine that an intelligent species isn't the one they were looking for, they all totally lose interest. Hello?)

Unlike many reviewers, I didn't find the "blues" especially different from humans. The author tried very hard to make them different, but they're no more alien than the folks in an ethnically different part of town.

The book tries to surprise you by setting things up one way and then having them turn out to be something very different. The set up is so clumsy that the end is revealed at the beginning. (Assertions made about a certain phenomenon come to mind.)

The plot progressed well, and the main character was well developed. An interesting read, but not a very deep one.

Matthew Farrel's first book breaks the mold by taking a look at our cultural assumptions and giving us a brand new look at a very different alien culture, and how we interact with supposedly 'inferior' cultures. Just like many people refuse to believe a group of ancient 'savage' Egyptians could build the majestic pharoahs that amazed the European travellers of the 18th century, instead attributing the marvelous work of construction to 'alien astronouts' or other hogwash, so too is the impulse of humans in this book to assume similar things of the alien culture they encounter.

Mathew Farel shows a flair for taking us outside of our predispositions and giving us a look at what the danger of drawing such cultural assumptions are.

And he does this while providing a rich, character filled story that keeps you reading. Seriously, it's worth a look see. Definitely an author to keep an eye out for in the future.

...On its own terms, Thunder Rift is a nicely done book. It does, however, require fairly close reading to both follow what is going on and figure out why that matters (which is far from a criticism). It certainly has allegorical/symbolical aspects, but they are properly foreshadowed and internally consistent with the book, and do not result in just a "fairy tale"--which, in any event, is a description, not an evaluation. While I agree that the alternating-chapter structure was a bit difficult to follow, there is an actual narrative strategy behind it that appears to have escaped the shallow reading of a prior reviewer.

Thunder Rift is not a perfect book. No book is a perfect book, and I'm far from an easy judge....

This is a very innovative, well written work by Matthew Farrell. His characters are believeable to me and the plot twists rather nicely at the end. The main thing that sold me on this book was the Blues, the aliens. Farrell definately knows how to write alien aliens. These were not creatures with the same agendas and motivations humans often expect to see in other races, mirroring their own. They were clearly un-human. The thickness with which the alien culture has been created is fascinating.

It may be true there are some things that remind one forcibly of Arthur C. Clarke and others, but I don't see the flaw in that. SciFi is constantly speculative, but if plot lines converge for a moment or two it's not to be unexpected. This is a work that carries on the tradition of scifi while presenting fresh, new ideas for the reader's consideration.

This is, in my opinion, a rare example of "literary" science fiction.

Don't be misled by the extremists.
This is a good book.

"Thunder Rift" portrays a near future Earth in which a wormhole appears in Jupiter's vicinity. The rip in the fabric of spacetime rains energy onto Earth from throughout the EM spectrum disrupting almost all technology that depends on electronics. Taria Spears grows up during the difficult time of rebuilding and develops a fascination for Thunder, as it is called. As a young adult, she is on the first manned expedition (following probes and animal missions) through the mysterious rift. Their goal is to find the undoubtedly advanced civilization that created the phenomenon.

Thunder Rift has some strong points, but flaws ultimately overwhelm the book. On the positive side, humans are cautious as they probe the Rift. For instance, the primary explorer ship, Lightbringer, has small and armed escort ships as it moves through the wormhole and across light years of space. When the explorers encounter a planet with life, they minimize direct contact with the environment and conduct extensive decontamination and quarantine of anyone who visits the planet. They expose animals to the alien atmosphere before risking a human. At this point, the novel has the feeling of being carefully thought out and planned. The author shows a realistic approach to something unknown, presumably interesting and possibly dangerous.

The devil is in the details, however, and the novel subsequently falls apart. Two major flaws exemplify the problems. The author often alternates chapters between the protagonist's activities on the mission and her childhood. Some of these give us insight into the main character. Later "flips" disrupt the flow of the action in the future while adding nothing important about the main character.

As annoying as this was, there were many points when the story just failed to make sense. An example is the alien planet that was initially deemed to lack intelligent life by sensor scans from orbiting probes. The planet is described as having very little metal and the probes detect no refined metal that characterizes an advanced civilization. Later in the novel, however, Taria has met the aliens who populate the planet and takes a ride on one of the aliens' ferryboats! With no facilities for refining metals, where did the steam-driven ferryboats come from? Further, why were advanced orbiting probes unable to detect even the heat signature from ferryboats (and presumably other industrial activity)? The novel becomes a fairy tale in the end, which is disappointing after the promising start. [My personal 5 star reference- Dune, Hyperion, Ender's Game]

I suppose there are some people out there who will find Farrell's first work to be a worthy offering. Frankly, I found it tedious, preachy and unlikely. Others have already summarized the plot for you the reader, so I won't bother. Instead I will say that the plot is predictable (I knew how it would end by the second chapter after the explorers reach Little Sister), and the characterizations at times wooden. His stereotype of the military as rigid, unimaginative characters was typical and unpleasant to say the least (why does it escape the notice of most SF writers of this ilk that the vast majority of the NASA Astronaut Corps are military, and do just fine in exploration situations?), though he did seem to shake off some of that by book's end. And after forty-eight years of reading SF, I am heartily tired of meeting the "superior primitive," or, in other words, a primitive race with little more than fire to recommend it, but that sees the univers sooo much more clearly than we idiot humans. I could find no compelling reason to believe that the Great Singers were the creators of Thunder Rift, indeed, simple biology makes it hard to believe that such creatures could deal with energies that compel stars to burn and even some to explode and space to warp. All in all, this was a disappointing read, one that I had to persevere to finish. Read this if you like impossible aliens who think deep thoughts. Read this if you believe that Western civilization is morally bankrupt. Read this if you have no great interest in a good story, but want to discover the zen of SF. Do not read this if you want to be entertained.
I will conclude by saying that Matthew Farrell has potential. His wordcraft was superb, and he dealt well with some rather sophisticated and complex persons in the story (BTW, he earns an A+ for political correctness). He needs to grow, however. He needs to rethink his characterization and he needs to rediscover what makes a good plot. And, most important, he needs to stop apologizing for being human.