- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: St Martin's Press; hardcover edition (21 Jun 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312877730
- ISBN-13: 978-0312877736
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 14.6 x 2.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,791,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"Brian Stableford is one of the most inventive and original writers working today." --"The Times, " London
"Brian Stableford has triumphantly created his own niche of hard biological SF, containing the genre's most intelligently imagined marvels and nightmares." --David Langford
"Brian Stableford has triumphantly created his own niche of hard biological SF, containing the genre's most intelligently imagined marvels and nightmares." --David Langford
Product Description
This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope, filled with wonders, that expands Brian Stableford's ambitious on-going future history series begun in Inherit the Earth and continued in Architects of Emortality and The Fountains of Youth. It is the 21st century, a world of rapid change and biotech threats and promises. World War Three, the biotech war, is on the horizon and the world as we know it is going to end. The fateful question is, who is going to choose what kind of future comes next, and who gets to live in this new world to come? Lisa Frieman, a forensic researcher, is attacked in her apartment. Jordan Miller, a distinguished scientist, and Lisa's former co-worker, has disappeared, taking with him a secret discovery. But what does he possess that everyone wants?
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
When Lisa first heard the noise, she wasn't sure whether it was real or not. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
When Lisa first heard the noise, she wasn't sure whether it was real or not. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Given a choice between watching a wall and reading this intellectually under-nourished, lazy, characterless book, then I would hope for an interesting wall. This is writing so bad the brain glances off the attention repelling surface of its prose: I managed to read the first 58 pages (which could have been summarized in a single paragraph without loss) but no more. Please, no - NOOOO!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Part typical Stableford territory of thoughtful speculative near future SF and part straight detective story. Set in a world that's close enough to ours to be reconisable, well thought out enough to be plausible, and nasty enough to not be a world that most of us would want to live in if we had any say in the matter.
If you're expecting BIG ideas, or high action, you'll be disappointed, but the book delivers with the quality of the writing, characterisation and plot that is familiar to anyone whos read much Stableford.
If you read the books in the order described in the summary above, this one seems to be out of sequence and timewise it should really be the first of the series. It fills some interesting back story in the Emortality ideas and deals with characters who receive passing (but important) mentions in the other books.
Highly recommended.
If you're expecting BIG ideas, or high action, you'll be disappointed, but the book delivers with the quality of the writing, characterisation and plot that is familiar to anyone whos read much Stableford.
If you read the books in the order described in the summary above, this one seems to be out of sequence and timewise it should really be the first of the series. It fills some interesting back story in the Emortality ideas and deals with characters who receive passing (but important) mentions in the other books.
Highly recommended.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Entertaining if not memorable
27 Nov 2001
Format:Hardcover
Stableford has set The Cassandra Complex about 40 years in the future with the seeds of the action sown in our time. The novel is a prequel to earlier work but stands solidly on its own.
The Cassandra Complex is really more of a techno-thriller than science fiction novel. The action is more in line with a police thriller than most hard SF. However, there is enough SF to satisfy fans of the genre. Stableford tends to fall in the trap when setting mysteries in SF that the investigator knows information about the times that the reader doesn't. If one likes to solve the mystery based on the clues then the information isn't in The Cassandra Complex to do so.
All in all it was a fast-paced enjoyable read, I read it some time ago, but it hasn't stuck with me. It isn't new or original but it is well constructed.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Memorable and frightening vision
24 Jan 2002
Format:Hardcover
The time is 40 years in the future -- maybe not our lives, but certainly a reality that could be our children's. A novel of frightening and important ideas and issues: extreme overpopulation, megacorps, and hyperflu wars. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. Who will determine how the scales tilt? The characters are not sharply defined, but the novel is more about the vision than about the people.
14 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Good future vision, too preachy
19 April 2001
Format:Hardcover
THE CASSANDRA EFFECT is set in a near future (mid-twentyfirst century) England. Overpopulation has become a major problem, huge corporations rule as the cabel, and plague wars have replaced the bomb as the great fear. Author Brian Stableford draws out logical consequences from today's biological sciences with discussions of disease, cloning, and population spikes.
Unfortunately, Stableford describes this potentially fascinating world through long blocks of descriptive dialogue, internal dialogue, and description. Rather than have information flow from the story, it is presented to the reader in huge slabs which must be choked down if one is to continue with the story.
I wanted to like this book more than I did. I find the premise interesting, the plot was certainly fine, and the one significant character, Lisa, a police officer and biologist, was likable and well motivated.
I found the dense writing to be a fairly stiff price to pay for an intriguing concept.
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