Category: One and a Half Stars

Movie Review: M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Artificial Intelligence, Movies, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

On a 5-hour flight, to make the hours go by, I watched a movie I would normally not be interested in. M3GAN 2.0, pronounced “Megan” is – you guessed it – a sequel to the original M3GAN, released in 2022. M3GAN was a horror-comedy. I did not watch it, since I am not much into horror, or comedy.

M3GAN 2.0 starts two years after M3GAN’s rampage. M3GAN is a robot, built by genius entrepreneur Gemma. When Gemma learns that M3GAN has gone rogue, she swears that she will from then on only work on protecting humanity from AI gone bad, but in order to save the world from another killer robot, Amelia, she has to give M3GAN 2.0 a body and take risks again.

Gemma, genius that she is supposed to be, in surprisingly juvenile in her thinking, and her niece Cady, whom she is raising, is the mother in the family. M3GAN (old and new) has a Barbie body with the head that looks a lot like Regan, the girl who becomes possessed in the 1973 movie The Exorcist. I wonder if that was intentional.

The movie is confusing at best. There are many, sometimes conflicting storylines. It touts high tech, parades mad billionaires, lectures about the security of AI, and imagines what a killer robot might do. The story seems too complicated, with too many plot twists to follow. And in the end, just like in the Terminator movies, the battle between two robots is solved by a karate-spiced fistfight. It seems we humans can only understand fights when they are done with fists, or maybe with guns, whether that’s what robots would do notwithstanding. Also, when showing the robot seeing or perceiving, the screen just shows what might be in their field of vision, overlayed by screen windows of JAVA code scrolling by rapidly. Yeah, that’s how robots see!

Of course, this is a movie for a general audience that does not know much about AI or code or robots, for that matter, it’s about entertainment, it’s about technology and its marvels. In that the movie succeeds.

Would I recommend you go see M3GAN 2.0?

No.

You’re not missing anything.

Book Review: Colony One Mars – by Gerald M. Kilby

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction1 Comment

The first human colony on Mars consisted of a number of habitats and 54 colonists. An intense, 6-month-long dust storm covered all the solar panels and destroyed much of the facility. After all contact was lost, and satellite imagery showed much of the facility destroyed, it took several years before a new mission could be launched to investigate what might have happened.

Six astronauts eventually landed nearby and started investigating. What they found was not quite what they expected. In particular, apparently there were survivors. Quickly, however, some of the crew members started getting ill, experienced psychotic episodes and started turning against each other.

Colony One Mars is the first book of a series of six books. I knew that when I picked it up. After reading, I now realize that it’s not really a book, but the first chapter of a long book of six chapters. There is no real resolution, no end, many questions remain unanswered, and yes, you want to pick up the next book. And I guess that is the point.

However, it is just not good enough a story that I want to spend more time on it. This book reminded me of The Object by Joshua T. Calvert, which I reviewed about a year ago, where I said this verbatim:

Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.

The only difference is that the mission does not visit an alien vessel, it visits a derelict colony on Mars, but the mission participants are for the most part cardboard characters with no real personalities. There is a female Ph.D. biologist who is the protagonist. The mission commander and the first officer are both one-dimensional humans who seem to be built just for the simple plot of this book. The author really does not bother to build characters for the entire crew. They are just there to move things along.

There is a commercial faction on Earth who pulls the financial strings of the mission, called COM, which stands for “Colony One Mars.” There are board members who are pure evil, motivated only by money, who are the actual culprits and who use people as expendable pawns in their game of riches.

Interestingly, there is a character named Leon Maximus, who is introduced here:

Leon Maximus, on the other hand, Peter admired. He was motivated by a seemingly sincere desire to advance human civilization. To make it an interplanetary species. To establish a Planet B, as he liked to call it. He was a rare breed indeed. None of this would have been possible if it were not for him and his genius. His company had developed the rocket technology to get the first colonists to Mars. Still, it was a slow tedious process. It was an eight month trip and, with the way the planets orbited each other, a tight two year launch window.

Kilby, Gerald M.. Colony One Mars: Fast Paced Scifi Thriller (Colony Mars Series Book 1) (pp. 80-81). Outer Planet Media. Kindle Edition.

You can move the letters of Leon around and match them to a real person in our time who is obsessed with colonizing Mars.

There are a lot of raving reviews out there about this hard science fiction book and it being a page-turner. Well, I turned the pages all the way through, but it’s really a story that is very contrived and just not all that interesting. If you want a real Mars story, you need to read The Martian, by Andy Weir.

Colony One Mars is the first book of a series, but I won’t read the other five.

 

Movie Review: Absolution (2024)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One and a Half Stars, Two StarsLeave a comment

Liam Neeson plays an unnamed thug, a grizzled gangster and former boxer in Boston. He does thug jobs for a local small-time crime boss. He realizes that he is approaching the end of his “career” because he keeps forgetting basic stuff, like the names of his friends and places he was supposed to go. He has himself checked by a doctor and finds out he has Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease caused by repetitive brain trauma, such as concussions from boxing. There is no cure and no treatment. The doctor tells him it will just get worse. He won’t live long.

As a result, he tries to get his affairs in order. He finds a girlfriend who has her own ghosts but somehow sees a kindred spirit in him. He has a daughter whom he abandoned in his younger years and she has a son. The daughter wants nothing to do with him, but he manages to get a connection with the grandson and he tries to redeem himself.

But the underworld has him solidly in its grip, and he can’t escape.

Absolution is not a Liam Neeson old hero action movie. It’s a slow study of an aging gangster with no place to go. As such, it is difficult to watch. There is not much of a story, or lesson, or feel-good spirit. The thug has a bad life, and it’s not getting better.

Absolution is boring and deeply depressing film.

Book Review: Foundation Trilogy – by Isaac Asimov

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction2 Comments

Isaac Asimov published the Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950ies.

  • Book 1: Foundation (1951)
  • Book 2: Foundation and Empire (1952)
  • Book 3: Second Foundation (1953)

I first read the three books some 40 years ago in my twenties, but I only had vague memories. I remember them being good and, at the time, iconic. When a friend recently made a reference to them I decided to read them again. Usually I review books individually, but after reading the full trilogy, I came to the conclusion that they need to be combined. The books don’t stand on their own. The trilogy is really just one very long book.

Asimov added several more books to the series, two prequels and two sequels:

  • Book 4: Foundation’s Edge (1982) – sequel
  • Book 5: Foundation and Earth (1986) – sequel
  • Book 6: Prelude to Foundation (1988) – prequel
  • Book 7: Forward the Foundation (1993) – prequel

Book 7  was published after Asimov’s death in 1992.

I have not read any of the other four.

The trilogy plays about 10,000 years in the future. Humanity has invented interstellar travel by using ships that can make hyperspace jumps to travel the vast distances between stars.

The population of the galaxy at that  time is estimated to be quintillions of people, living on about 20 million planets which they call “worlds.” The capital of the Galactic Empire is the planet Trantor, which is completely covered by a gigantic city and has a population of approximately 40 billion people. The Empire is at a breaking point. The mathematician Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory, which allows him to predict the future. He creates a foundation of scientists with the objective to rebuild a new empire out of the chaos and lawlessness of millennia of anarchy.

Asimov builds a world, a universe, a psychology and a political system in the Foundation Trilogy. What strikes me reading it now in 2025 is that it is really not a science fiction story, but a story of politics. The Galactic Empire could be the Roman Empire, or even the United States of today. In the Foundation Trilogy, people live on planets, but they could just as well live in city states of the Roman Empire. The people travel on spaceships, but the technology is mysterious and not really described. Asimov refers to “nuclear” energy as the solution to all energy problems. The spaceships just seem to be able to travel vast distances without needing to take on fuel – because they have “nuclear” engines. The Foundation is the preeminent power in the Galaxy because it’s the only political entity that still knows to to control nuclear energy. There is no time dilation since the ships seem to just make jumps but never really accelerate in normal space. He does not bother to explain any of this technology. It is simply the basis of the story, which is mostly told via dialog between key characters. There are also no computers, and there is no Internet. Messages are sent via vacuum tubes, like those we still see in bank drive-ins. The Foundation Trilogy is a political novel, not a science fiction story. Another thing that I found odd is that there are absolutely no aliens in this universe. You’d think that Asimov would have assumed that there are alien civilizations amongst the 20 million inhabited worlds, but there is not a single alien in the entire story.

Essentially, Asimov wrote the Foundation Trilogy as a political saga in “space” based on the knowledge he had in the 1940ies.

I am pretty sure that if I had rated the trilogy when I first read it 40 years ago in the 1980ies, I would have given it three stars. But today, I found it fairly uninteresting, not particularly suspenseful, with hokey science and an inadequate depiction of a space-traveling society. That maxes out at 1.5 stars.

 

Book Review: The Little Book of Value Investing – by Christopher H. Browne

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Business, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

After I read The Little Book of Robo Investing a couple of weeks ago, I immediately opened an account on Wealthfront and starting taking it for a spin. After a few days of watching it work, I thought it’d be a great give for my (adult) son for Christmas. I went on Amazon and bought another hardcopy version to give to him. When it arrived a day later, it was this book instead: The Little Book of Value Investing. Apparently I had clicked on the book adjacent to the one I intended to order. While Amazon is very good about returns of erroneously bought merchandise, I thought the $22 would not matter and I might as well read it to broaden my outlook. What did they mean by “Value Investing?”

Browne is a seasoned investor who has been in the business himself since 1969. The premise of the book is that you buy cheap stocks with good potential and hold on to them for the long term. Investors who try to time the market and buy stocks when they are low and cash out when they are high are statistically not very successful, compared to the – well – Robo Investors. In the process of making his case, the author teaches us about stocks, how they work, how to read reports, how to evaluate balance sheets, all the traditional metrics that we learn in business school. Warren Buffett is brought up as an example numerous times, but then, Warren Buffett is quoted in every investment book of the last 30 years, so that might not mean too much. The story is the same one I learned in my recent readings of Robo Investing and also Tony Robbins’ Unshakable that I read just six weeks ago: Don’t day trade, don’t trade for the short term, don’t trade emotionally, but invest based on research and formulas proven by decades of research. If you want to learn about stock investing, this is a good book and a quick read.

There are some negatives, however: The book was first published in 2007. Here is a table included on page 42 showing the 20 largest corporations in the world, ranked by sales revenue.

I highlighted those four companies that are still on the list today in the last week of 2024. Just for comparison, I have created the equivalent table, just so you can see how the world has changed in the last 18 years:

CompanySales ($ billions)County
Walmart673United States
Amazon620United States
Saudi Aramco488Saudi Arabia
Berkshire Hathaway452United States
Sinopec435China
PetroChina417China
Apple391United States
United Health389United States
CVS Health368United States
Volkswagen354Germany
Exxon Mobil339United States
Alphabet (Google)339United States
McKesson330United States
Toyota312Japan
China State Construction310China
Shell296United Kingdom
Cencora293United States
Costoco258United States
Glencore255Switzerland
Microsoft254United States

Note that many of today’s most iconic companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple were not even close then. The world has changed since 2007.

As a result, you can use this book as a textbook on investing and evaluation of companies, but I would not recommend it as an investment guide for 2025. If I had picked it up in 2007, I would have given it 3 stars. Today, simply for the brutal fact that it is dated, 1.5 is all I can do.

 

Book Review: The Object – by Joshua T. Calvert

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction8 Comments

Melody Adams works for NASA as a physicist and astronomer. One night, in Hawaii, she discovers an odd object near Pluto with attributes that don’t make any sense. She and her associate quickly come to the conclusion that the object must be coming from outside the solar system. Furthermore, it does not behave like a natural object. When she goes public with her discovery, she quickly loses credibility with the scientific community and NASA, and gets fired.

Fast forward a few years, when the object is observed again near Saturn, slowing down. All doubts are erased. Melody quickly gets back in good graces with NASA, and she eventually gets the commander post as an astronaut on a mission to rendezvous with the object. Once on the journey, things quickly go wrong, and a rift develops between the crew on the ship and Earth and its petty politics.

The book, even on its cover, is portrayed as hard science fiction. It plays in the near future, and the characters all use today’s technology. But I don’t think this is hard science fiction, like Andy Weir’s The Martian. Actually, I found it kind of hokey. Melody Adams, the protagonist, is one of those female astronaut superheroes. She is smarter than everyone else, she has a Ph.D. in physics, she is at the top of her astronaut class, and – as you would not suspect – she sleeps with Jim, the NASA administrator. That whole side plot of being in love with Jim makes no sense, does not contribute to the plot, and I could not quite figure out why it was there.

Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.

Movie Review: The Taste of Things (2023) – La Passion de Dodin Bouffant

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

A French gourmet, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) has developed a romantic relationship with his live-in cook of 20 years, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). He has proposed marriage to her numerous times, and she has apparently rejected him as often. Eventually he starts cooking for her to convince her. This is the story line of the film. 

It plays in the French countryside sometime in the 19th century, based on the fact that lighting in the manor is solely by candles and the hearth is wood-fired. It is not clear what Dodin’s profession is other than chef, because we never see him working other than in his own kitchen, serving a handful of his friends in the village. He obviously has a reputation as a superb chef, since he is even invited for dinner by a prince traveling through the area.

The Taste of Things is a French film with English subtitles. I enjoyed listening to the French in an effort to practice my 40-years-rusty French. The photography is exquisite. It made me feel like I was walking around in a Renoir painting.

There was no music, no soundtrack of any type, other than the constant French dialog, which is somewhat musical on its own. The only music I remember was when the final credits rolled.

The movie is two-and-a-half hours long and nothing really happens. They cook. They cook a lot. There are extensive scenes of nothing but cooking complex French recipes, meats, baked goods and lots of sauces. The entire movie is about cooking, more cooking, more cooking, and eating, and cooking, and eating, and cooking. If you are a foodie, or a cook, you might enjoy this. I am not a foodie or a cook, and I don’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday, so all this was meaningless to me. After a while, it got really boring, and I had a hard time staying awake, not that I would have missed anything had I actually fallen asleep.

Apparently when you watch more than two full hours of nothing but cooking and eating without any other action or even music, sprinkled in with 30 minutes of slow action, you get full.

There is a set of trivia I picked up on IMDb: The two main actors who play Dodin  and his cook, Eugénie, were once married in real life (1998 – 2003).

 

Book Review: The Mapmaker’s Daughter – by Clare Marchant

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, One and a Half Stars2 Comments

The Mapmaker’s Daughter is a book of historical fiction that plays in England and partly in Holland in the 1580 time period.

Frieda Ortelius as a young girl in Holland when her parents are brutally killed by the Spanish as part of the Inquisition. The Catholics (the Spanish) were killing Protestants during that time, and one of the havens for Protestants was England, ruled then by Queen Elizabeth I.

Frieda escapes and makes a life for herself with her seafaring husband in London. She comes from a family of mapmakers, and she learns the trade and excels so much that she catches the attention of the Queen. During a time of war with the Spanish, Francis Drake was a privateer working for the English crown. Queen Elizabeth eventually commissions Frieda to create a detailed map of the south of England to help Drake in the fight against the Spanish.

This is all good historical fiction, and I learned a lot about the period and how the people suffered from the Inquisition and the tyranny of the Spanish.

However, interwoven between the chapters about Frieda’s life and story is another story in the present day: Robyn Willoughby is a thirty-six-year-old woman who works in her father’s antique map store when they find a blood-stained map they cannot identify. Robyn goes on a quest to find out. However, along with Robyn comes Robyn’s husband Nate, who vanished seven years before during a solo around the world sailing race. The Vendée Globe is the greatest sailing race round the world, solo, non-stop and without assistance, and it is also by far the most dangerous of all sailing adventures.

Throughout the entire book, Robyn pines after Nate and the pain she goes through even after seven years fills the chapters in this book. At first I thought there must be some plot twist that would explain the presence of Nate as a significant protagonist in this story, but sadly, there wasn’t any. While I am sure his death was tragic, and while I am sure his wife suffered, none of that had anything to do with this story and it simply resulted in more words on the pages that didn’t move anything along.

As a matter of my opinion, the author could have left Robyn out of the book altogether without loss of impact. Of course, the book would have only been half as long.

But as the Germans like to say: In der Kürze liegt die Würze.

All in all, an interesting historical novel with way, way, way too much fluff that did nothing but water it down and make it longer.

 

 

By the way, if you are interested in learning more about the Vendée Globe, there are several books that tell a riveting story:

Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World’s Most Dangerous Waters

I read Godforsaken Sea many years ago before I had started doing my book reviews, so I can’t show you that. But it’s an amazing read about the 1996-97 race. Another book about the same race is Alone: The True Story of the Man Who Fought the Sharks, Waves, and Weather of the South Atlantic – by Michael Calvin. I have not yet read Alone.

Book Review: Bad Monkey – by Carl Hiaasen

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

A few weeks ago we visited Key West, Florida, for the first time. When talking about the trip with friends, someone recommended that I read Bad Monkey, since it’s a hilarious book, and a lot of the action takes place in Key West. I had also heard about the book Squeeze Me by the same author, and word was that it, too, was hilarious.

A hapless former deputy sheriff named Andrew Yancy in Key West is drawn into a murder case. A tourist out on a deep-sea fishing boat had reeled in a human arm, presumably the only remains after a fatal shark attack. But once the coroner in Miami gets a look at the arm, it quickly becomes clear that what looks like a shark attack may well be a murder case. Without official authorization, Yancy decides to solve the case with the help of a whole community of other misfits.

The story is hilarious and sometimes I had to laugh out loud. Hiaasen seems to have intimate knowledge of the souls of the people in southern Florida, the Keys, and the Bahamas. He makes fun of the people and the institutions in the self-deprecating manner of an insider of that world.

Having just spent a long weekend in Key West, I enjoyed references to local places and tourist activities. Bad Monkey was a fun, quick read that entertained me and had me turning the pages. There is a sequel to this book, and Hiaasen wrote many other crime novels, presumably along the same lines, with goofy characters, strange and unlikely events and local idiosyncrasies.

There is not any moral to the story, or any big lesson to learn. Bad Monkey is pure entertainment – that’s all.

Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

In World War II, the British need to deceive the Germans that they are about to attack Greece, turning German attention away from Sicily, their actual target.

To do that, they float a corpse of a British officer in the ocean to be found by the Germans. The officer holds a briefcase of classified material, fabricated to support the story. The problem is, how to make it convincing and foolproof. The Germans are smart and the whole plot turns into a game of “do they know that we know that they know that we know?” Thousands of lives of the soldiers attacking Sicily on the fateful day depend on the Germans falling for the ruse. If they don’t, it will be a bloodbath on the beaches of Sicily.

Operation Mincemeat shows the shadow warriors behind the scenes, who do their work from desks. It’s a spy thriller, based on a true story.

Book Review: The Spaceship in the Stone – by Igor Nikolic

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science FictionLeave a comment

Michael Freeman is an ex-special forces soldier who was injured in the war and is now a disabled veteran. He loses his job and his girlfriend, and he wants to get away to “find himself.”

He was raised by his grandfather in a self-sufficient cabin in the woods. His grandfather has long passed, and Michael goes back to the cabin to get away from it all – with a few six-packs of beer.

When he hikes in the woods behind his cabin, he suddenly falls into a sinkhole or hidden cave, gets hurt badly and passes out. Nobody knows where he is.

When he wakes up he finds himself in a very different world. It turns out he fell onto a hidden spaceship in the rocks below the woods, which has been there for thousands of years, governed by an artificial intelligence, and powered by nano-technology.

Within a few days, Michael, the jaded disabled veteran, turns into a superhero with true superpowers and a mission to change the world with access to all this alien technology.

Of course, soon bad guys show up from all sides making things challenging. Michael assembles a team of ex-soldiers and the battle starts.

The Spaceship in the Stone is a cartoonish fantasy story, of course with a sequel. The characters are wooden, the dialog stilted, the plot contrived and the entire story just over the top.

I finished reading it, though, mildly enjoyed it, but quickly forgot most of the details within the next few days. I was not interested enough to bother picking up Book 2 of “The Space Legacy.”

 

 

Book Review: Conrad’s Time Machine – by Leo Frankowski

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction, Time TravelLeave a comment

The friends and former roommates with the strange names of Tom Kolczyskrenski (try to pronounce that), Ian McTavish and Jim Hasenpfeffer get together for a motorcycle cruise across the country.

Tom is an Air Force grunt with a genius IQ and an affinity for electronics.

Ian got his degree in mechanical engineering and has a lucrative job with GM.

Jim got his Ph.D. in behavioral science and is studying the social interactions of motorcycle gangs.

When the three are on the road, they hear an explosion nearby and happen to be the first ones at the scene, before any rescue services arrive. They find a perfectly hemispherical hole in the ground where a house used to be, and the former contents of the hole appearing in the surrounding area over time.

Long story short, they discover the plans for a technology that eventually ends up creating a time machine. And thus the three misfits decide that they are going to get very rich.

Frankowski is a good story teller. It’s a lighthearted tale that does not take itself too seriously. The characters are funny and a bit cartoonish. They talk with each other like no real people would talk. Either the author intends it that way, or he is really poor with creating dialog. I think it’s the former.

This book is full of casual time travel stunts in everyday life. It creates a new universe, of course so there can be more books in the series. Frankowski writes a lot of books in series, but the naming conventions are somewhat confusing. For instance, there is no Conrad in this book at all, and I can’t quite understand where the title comes from.

In summary, it’s a fun, lighthearted read with a lot of speculative science ideas and perfected time travel. The story is enjoyable, a crack-up even, albeit a bit hokey.

You might enjoy it. I myself won’t be reading any more Frankowski books, though.

Book Review: Time Tunnel: The Eclipse – by Richard Todd

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction, Time TravelLeave a comment

It is 1890. Annika finds herself without a transponder, which is the device she needs to return home to her own time in 2008. Stranded in time, with no way to go home, she makes the best of her situation and fights for the Sioux. She has a little help, because Kyle left his backpack on the counter in a bar when it disappeared. The bag contained his laptop which had basically all human knowledge as of 2008 on its hard drive (go figure how that would be possible).

This is book three out of three in the Time Tunnel series by Richard Todd. There is a little time travel plot twist here, but otherwise it’s just an alternate history story reminiscent of the trilogy by S.M. Stirling starting with Island in the Sea of Time.

I can recommend that series highly. In comparison, Time Tunnel: The Eclipse is a simple-minded tale of alternate history in a world where the United States disintegrates from internal strife and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan rule the world outside of America.

Todd’s character development devolves in this third book. Most of the characters do stuff and react in ways that do not make much sense and seem very unrealistic. I got the feeling that the author just wanted to hurry and wrap this series up.

I finished reading this book simply because I had invested time in the first two of the series and I wanted to learn what would happen to Annika. However, the third book didn’t add anything new other than a neat plot twist at the end.

 

 

Book Review: The Sentinel – by T. M. Haviland

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science FictionLeave a comment

About a hundred years in our future, around 2124, there is a small permanent human settlement on Mars, and permanents space stations in Earth orbit and on the moon are a reality.

The hunt for rare minerals to feed the needs of technology has intensified, and there are companies mining in Antarctica, under several kilometers of ice, using robotic mining equipment for prospecting.

In this endeavor, a mining team finds what they think is a peculiar meteor that must have been there for more than 10 million years, which is at least how long that part of Antarctica has been covered by thick glaciers.

As they study the object, however, they find anomalies that they can’t explain, and they gradually come to the realization that they are dealing with an alien artifact.

But what does humanity do with something it does not understand? Try to destroy it.

As you might expect, that starts off a chain of events that may not be stoppable.

The Sentinel is a speculative fiction book that tells a story. The characters are simple and one-dimensional, and much of the plot is fairly predictable.

I enjoyed reading it to a point, but I would probably not clamor to read more books by this author.

Book Review: The Ark – by Patrick S. Tomlinson

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Generation Ships, One and a Half Stars, Science FictionLeave a comment

Mankind discovers a black hole heading directly into the solar system. Humanity faces complete obliteration as a result. Using all the world’s resources, they build a massive starship to send on its way to Tau Ceti, where a habitable planet was found that should be suitable for humans. The Ark, as the ship is called, travels at about 5% the speed of light. This means it will take almost two and a half centuries to bridge the gap of 12 lightyears. The Ark is truly a generation ship. All of the 50,000 people who were chosen to leave Earth would never see their destination but live out their lives on the ship. Entire new generations will be born, live their lives, and die, never seeing their destination. Imagine living on a ship now that left Earth at about the time of the American Declaration of Independence. That would be the timeframe.

The story starts just before arrival at Tau Ceti. Bryan Benson is a retired sports hero. He now works as a detective. After a crew member goes missing, he eventually discovers that a murder has taken place. As he digs deeper, he finds that there appears to be a conspiracy involving the most powerful people on the ship that could jeopardize the entire mission and possibly annihilate the last living members of the human race, the 50,000 souls living on the Ark.

I picked up this book because I love generation ship stories. I have read and reviewed five books about generation ships in this blog (you can find the reviews by selecting “Generation Ships” in the categories dropdown.

I enjoyed the description of the ship and its technology, but had a hard time picturing it in my head. The author does not do a very good job describing things.

The Ark is actually Book 1 of a series of three books titled “Children of a Dead Earth.” I didn’t think I’d go for the second in the series, but the publishers cleverly put the first few chapters into the end of this book, and it pulled me in. See my review of Book 2 next.