Echoes of Earth / Sean Williams & Shane Dix

Echoes of Earth

category: science fiction, authors:

Sean Williams & Shane Dix

book 1 of The Orphans Trilogy
published by Voyager, original copyright 2002, read in June 2010

Agamedes' opinion: 6 out of 10

Okay, here's the idea: Human minds are copied into a computer then spend a century flying to another star system. There, they are given alien artifacts including an FTL spaceship; they could fly home in two days. So what do they do? (btw: FTL = Faster Than Light.)

Well, John Carter of Mars would have leaped into the spaceship and rescued a beautiful, scantily-clad princess by lunchtime. Richard Ballinger Seaton would have analysed the FTL drive, upgraded to Skylark FTL and rescued an entire civilisation (whose people are all beautiful and/or handsome and can see no point in wearing clothes), all within a couple of days. Even Bilbo Baggins would have used the spaceship, possibly to escape from the Sackville Bagginses...

The characters in Echoes of Earth... call a management meeting to discuss the question. The meeting can barely agree to put a flight plan proposal to the rest of the crew, with a vote on future use of FTL spaceship to be put to a general but non-binding vote, perhaps in a week or two, for further consideration by management.

What a load of time-wasting rubbish!

The whole book is like that: slow.

Worse yet... After endless debate on whether or not they should use the free FTL spaceship, they leap with almost no discussion into use of the alien FTL communicator. And -- here's a plot spoiler -- use of the FTL communicator is the one thing that they should not have done!

Several years ago I picked up the second book of this trilogy. I read the brief "what came before", the summary of book 1, Echoes. I read the summary of book 1 and thought, Good grief! that's ridiculous! ... and decided to not read book 2.

I've now read book 1. The plot is actually not as bad as the summary indicated. It is just... soooo... sloooooowwwww.

It's not really a bad book. Just slow. Doc Smith could have crowded the entire trilogy into a far more exciting, single volume. And still had enough great storylines for two more volumes.

Read Echoes to pass the time. Its ideas may make you think. But it may just put you to sleep. And the characters will make you want to kick them into doing something -- anything -- rather than just sit around in endless, tedious, wondering-what-will-happen-next discussions.

..o0o..

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