The Bowl of Heaven

I just finished reading Bowl of Heaven by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford, I have read and enjoyed both of these writers work.  I consider Niven one of my favorite authors.  I liked Nivens’s last book and so thought to give this one a chance.  While not either author’s worst work, this book has issues, several issues that take away from my enjoyment of the book.

First nowhere does in on the cover or description does the book mention it is the first book of a series.  If I had known it was part of a series I would have waited for more of those books to have been published.  Despite being the introductory book in the series there seemed to be a lot of repetitive padding and stretching of the story as if there was a target number of pages to be reached and not a point when the story was done.

Second the book felt as if it was written by two people with little or no effort made to find out what the other had already written.  There are a couple of times when a human discovers something interesting and the reader gets a full description only to have that same discovery recounted by the same person in the next chapter.

Third, a colony ship sent to an unknown world hundreds of years away was sent without colonists trained for military or police work.  They did give the untrained colonists side arms like in any bad science fiction story.   The crew also seemed to lack anyone with any training or interest in first contact with an alien race.  I would go so far as to say I could have advised these fine people how to handle this situation and all I have done is read books and watch movies.  Seriously they just sent down a shuttle with no idea where to land and then panicked when their landing spot was not what was expected.  The authors and characters both seemed to have forgotten at that point that they were in a space craft in low gravity where they could just fly to a better landing spot.

Fourth, aliens! They could have been cool aliens! But the aliens seemed to be mostly ignored.  The alien point of view often felt more like padding than anything moving the plot along.

Anyway, the book is not as bad as this review might make it seem.  I did finish it after all, there are just issues.