Thirty years after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake killed his family, Lewis Crane has become the world's top seismologist, determined to protect people from his parent's fate. But in a world controlled by Chinese corporations and split by racist and religious strife, many don't want him to succeed.
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About the Author
Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead in 1917. During the Second World War he served as an RAF radar instructor, rising to the rank of Flight-Lieutenant. After the war he won a BSc in physics and mathematics with first class honours from King's College, London. One of the most respected of all science-fiction writers, he also won the KALINGA PRIZE, the AVIATION SPACE-WRITERS PRIZE,and the WESTINGHOUSE SCIENCE WRITING PRIZE. He also shared an OSCAR nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which was based on his story, 'The Sentinel'. He lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008. To discover more about how the legacy of Sir Arthur is being honoured today, please visit http://www.clarkefoundation.org
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Mr. G. Battle
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Arthur C. Clarke and his co-authour did not set out to create a straight-forward book about a massive earthquake. The result here, is a complex futuristic book, conceived from many cultural and political strands, resulting in a thriller rather than an action novel. The characters are well created, and their subsequent relationships draw you in to the story and keep you turning the pages. The irony is, unfortunately, the earthquakes are a device to move the characters forwards. However, as damning as that sounds, the book contains well designed concepts, emotional impact and should keep you going through the half-century of time the novel follows. Just don't expect a major motion picture type book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Big Ben
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Mass Market Paperback
A great plot, but patchy in its delivery. The plot has been detailed by others, so I'll spare you a repetition.
It meets one requirement for a great movie plot, too... "Start with an Earthquake, and build to a climax...."
The book starts with a series of earthquakes, and the plot moves along very snappily, until it gradually gets into politics...
Found that bit dragged on. But others clearly find it OK. Then it picks up again nearer the end, thankfully.
Well, that's how it seemed to me.
My boyhood hero the late Arthur C Clarke explains clearly that he _just_ did the plot synopsis, and the late Mike McQuay executed it (pretty competently, with caveats).
Clarke claims in his foreword to have read this book through - but I doubt that he did this carefully, since there are a couple of technical gaffes that spoil it for me. Things like a moon-skimmer that flies on fans. Fanning what, pray? Not a lot of air up there - good hard industrial vacuum. Stuff that we knew as kids in the 1950s - yes, I *was* a space cadet, and Arthur C Clarke was (as inventor of the geosynchronous communications satellite in the 1940s) one of our heroes. He would not have let this slip by, surely? Ah well. Age works its way with us all. Other slips include a large elevator using the earth's magnetic field - which is just not strong enough for the purpose.
Better for authors to ignore the science aspect if don't understand the schoolboy basics.
But it was readable, hence 3 stars. You might like it, even; but it was not for me.
It meets one requirement for a great movie plot, too... "Start with an Earthquake, and build to a climax...."
The book starts with a series of earthquakes, and the plot moves along very snappily, until it gradually gets into politics...
Found that bit dragged on. But others clearly find it OK. Then it picks up again nearer the end, thankfully.
Well, that's how it seemed to me.
My boyhood hero the late Arthur C Clarke explains clearly that he _just_ did the plot synopsis, and the late Mike McQuay executed it (pretty competently, with caveats).
Clarke claims in his foreword to have read this book through - but I doubt that he did this carefully, since there are a couple of technical gaffes that spoil it for me. Things like a moon-skimmer that flies on fans. Fanning what, pray? Not a lot of air up there - good hard industrial vacuum. Stuff that we knew as kids in the 1950s - yes, I *was* a space cadet, and Arthur C Clarke was (as inventor of the geosynchronous communications satellite in the 1940s) one of our heroes. He would not have let this slip by, surely? Ah well. Age works its way with us all. Other slips include a large elevator using the earth's magnetic field - which is just not strong enough for the purpose.
Better for authors to ignore the science aspect if don't understand the schoolboy basics.
But it was readable, hence 3 stars. You might like it, even; but it was not for me.
By R. B. Jones
Format:Hardcover
I bought this book because I'd read and enjoyed some of Clarke's earlier works like 2010: Odyssey II when I was a teenager.
The first disappointing thing about this book is that it's not actually written by Clarke at all, despite his name being emblazoned in inch-high lettering on the cover. All that Clarke did, as he explains in the introduction, is to write a 2 page plot outline, which he passed onto someone else because he was too lazy / untalented to write it himself. By the time you read this proviso, however, you've probably already shelled out the cover price and feeling short-changed.
Second, McQuay's prose is in an awful Americanised style, full of 2D stock characters, and transparently written with the intention on being converted into a Hollywood action thriller so they can make a ton of money. Hardly high literature. Science fiction writers trying to do characterisation never worked anyway, and it misses the point.
Third, the "science" behind the book is woefully inaccurate. At least Michael Crichton meticulously researched the genetics content of Jurassic Park: it had a basis in reality, was thought-provoking and you could learn something from it. Richter 10, on the other hand, is pure trashy fantasy. Clarke knows less about geology and earthquakes than the average GCSE student, and clearly didn't do any research before the afternoon he cobbled together his plot outline. For instance, he envisages California being split off from mainland America after a particularly large quake... when the San Andreas fault is actually a strike-slip boundary which only involves sideways motion, rather than extension, so this could never happen.
In summary, then, it's a terrible read, with no interesting science, and Clarke didn't even write it.
The first disappointing thing about this book is that it's not actually written by Clarke at all, despite his name being emblazoned in inch-high lettering on the cover. All that Clarke did, as he explains in the introduction, is to write a 2 page plot outline, which he passed onto someone else because he was too lazy / untalented to write it himself. By the time you read this proviso, however, you've probably already shelled out the cover price and feeling short-changed.
Second, McQuay's prose is in an awful Americanised style, full of 2D stock characters, and transparently written with the intention on being converted into a Hollywood action thriller so they can make a ton of money. Hardly high literature. Science fiction writers trying to do characterisation never worked anyway, and it misses the point.
Third, the "science" behind the book is woefully inaccurate. At least Michael Crichton meticulously researched the genetics content of Jurassic Park: it had a basis in reality, was thought-provoking and you could learn something from it. Richter 10, on the other hand, is pure trashy fantasy. Clarke knows less about geology and earthquakes than the average GCSE student, and clearly didn't do any research before the afternoon he cobbled together his plot outline. For instance, he envisages California being split off from mainland America after a particularly large quake... when the San Andreas fault is actually a strike-slip boundary which only involves sideways motion, rather than extension, so this could never happen.
In summary, then, it's a terrible read, with no interesting science, and Clarke didn't even write it.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
When this book eventually gets into its stride it's a lot better than you might think to begin with. Sir Arthur took to outsourcing his narratives with the later volumes of the Rama series, and at first I thought this was going to be as bad as those were. I reread it in the aftershock of the tsunami disaster of 12/26/04, something I wouldn't otherwise have done.
Clarke's true genius in fiction is as a short-story writer, and it seems to me that the great Childhood's End was the only real full-length novel he had in him. Even it hardly runs to 200 pages. The City and the Stars is slightly longer, but it is a reworking of an earlier 'novella' and gets a bit too big for its boots; and such productions as The Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama itself are stretched to the limits of what he is comfortable with. Subcontracting was one answer, and this story is based on an outline plot by Clarke (provided at the back) fleshed out to full standard novel length by Mike McQuay. The opening chapters are bloodsome - stilted dialogue, cardboard cutouts of characters and the event that triggered the environmental disaster which forms the basis of the plot given to one of the characters to 'tell', in a plonking and ludicrous way, to other characters who must have known all about it in the first place. Matters then improve as the scientific issues take centre stage. This was really Clarke's secret. He deserves no less an accolade than as one of the major educators of our age, bringing physics and astronomy to the masses. Even in his fiction he is always didactic, always explaining this or that scientific issue or correcting popular misapprehensions. Once the science takes control of the narrative, the characterisation here becomes less important, more like the routine way Clarke himself handles it.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Very intense and inspiring. The work of two masters.
The book is written by the late Mike McQuay upon a guideline from Clarke.
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