Discover Berço Illustrated By Arthur C. Clarke Displayed As Paper Edition

read two thirds of the book before something interesting happened, and the ending screams sequel, I would pass. Maybe you will fell differently, Enjoy! contains the worst sex scene ever written Den här boken skrevsoch det märks, Bortsett från det kuriost roliga i att se hur författarnas spekulationer om den nära framtiden alltsåstått sig mot facit, såhärår senare, så är det väldigt tydligt att boken är skriven i en tid då representation av kvinnor och minoriteter blivit aktuellt, men att hur en sådan representation skrivs utan att det blir en misogyn och rasistisk pastisch inte riktigt nått fram till författarna.


I övrigt är boken ganska seg och handlar mest om några människor och deras inbördes relationer de tänker mycket på att ligga och sina neuroser kring sex och relationer.
De bra delarna alltså delarna med aliens är få och utspridda, och ärligt talat dessutom inte särskilt bra de heller egentligen, De känns formulaiska och uttjatade de med,

Allt som allt två av fem, Läs inte om du inte verkligen gillar Arthur C Clarke ellertalet, Not even mediocre at best, It's a book written by two people, and it shows, The bulk of the book is a boring, typical Crichtonlike thriller/adventure story, Woven between sometimes in nearly incomprehensible separate chapters, sometimes as jarring asides is the actual scifi content, Unfortunately, the earthbased scifi was written for the future of twenty years ago and it has not aged particularly well, but it may have been better contemporaneously.
The alienbased scifi is overly detailed for the limited explanations the reader actually receives, Clark took the "you couldn't understand the tech, so I won't come up with an explanation" route, but he still takes an awfully long time to tell you nothing.
What's worse is that those chapters are written from the alien perspective they still use nano and milli prefixes though, somehow, so they are even harder to understand than should be necessary.
They make references to millicycles, for instance, which is clearly some length of time but you are not given enough information to decipher how long it is until almost the end of the bookyears, by the way.


There was an idea behind what the aliens were up to, but it remains philosophically unexplored, There was never any real resolution to any of the earthbased plot lines, but I wouldn't have enjoyed reading any more anyway, Nothing much interesting happened in this book, I liked the premise: an alien civilization is preparing to drop a "seed" of some sort on Earth, using the planet as a preserve for certain species, one of which is a superior strain of Human.
However, this book reads more like a biography, with every major character thinking a whole lot about their past without it impacting the story line much, if at all.
I was bored, and would have stopped reading if it weren't for the fact that I was waiting for a good or surprising ending, which didn't happen either.
Cradle is a first and unsatisfying collaboration by Arthur C, Clarke and Gentry Lee. It is an uninspiring treatment of a wellworn Scifi topic: first contact via an underwater oceanic alien hideout, Cradle also introduces readers to the rougher, more promiscuous writing style of Gentry Lee, Clarke has plenty of sexuality in his novels, but he usually spares readers the juicy details,

I would have enjoyed this novel more if Clarke and Lee had taken the story completely to the ocean, The toobrief passages describing alien oceans on far off worlds are wonderful, Instead, a great deal of time is spent on land, with the authors attempting characterdriven plot, Inasmuch as Lee was a fledging novelist, this was a weak choice, Whole chapters feel like a bad madeforTV movie about treasurehunting,

Still, I have a positive spin to offer, I'm a big fan of Clarke and Lees Rama trilogy, which all sources agree is mostly Lees writing, My guess is he learned a thing or two on this mediocre outing, paving the way for a betterconstructed saga based on Clarkes masterwork sitelinkRendezvous With Rama.
Many Clarke fans will disagree with my sentiments however, I think Lee who shows a love of great literature in his writing is worth the time of day.

This book was totally unbelievable, I don't know what it is with Clarke in thes, but he just went psycho with his characters during this period hard not to blame Lee really alouthgh they were good in the Rama series.
The first two thirds of this overlong novel goes into meaningless detail about the backgrounds of the various characters involved, and they're so formulaic their personalities are derived from formulae whose only input are 'moving' emotional scenes from their past.
It's as though the authors heard that scifis need 'character development' so they lifted a few chapters from a Mills and Boon novel, At least in the lates scifi authors began to realise that science and real people could actually coexist, Here a navy missile goes missing in the Gulf of Mexico and three treasure hunters, while looking for it, discover a ridiculously stupid alien spaceship under the waves.
This one was read over the Ganges in Varanasi, but it did not engage me, Carol Dawson, Miami Herald reporter, is the main character, Forceful and independent, she conceals her sexual relationship with Dr, Dale Michaels of the Miami Oceanographic Institute, She frequently reacts to sexist attitudes or comments of Nick Williams, owner of the boat she charters in order to scan the seafloor for a missing Navy missile.
She relates more warmly to Troy Jefferson, a young black electronics whiz and computer programmer, Eventually, she allows herself more open exchanges with Nick Williams, but she always harbors a fear of becoming emotionally close to a man a fear she traces to her parents' divorce and her father's departure when she was very young.
The memory of that loss limits her willingness to commit herself to another person in a mature relationship,

Nick Williams has the boat and the diving skills necessary for helping Carol Dawson, but Williams frequently objects to Dawson's control of their relationships, both in the business aspects and the personal aspects.
The scanning equipment Carol Dawson has borrowed for the search is unfamiliar to both of them, yet they quibble over its installation and use, Hurt by a past love affair with a wealthy wife of a fur dealer who was usually gone for long periods, Nick Williams is defensive, even chauvinistic towards women.
Ten years before, Monique had led him into exotic ecstasies until he realized he was simply a current toy whom another socialite offered to pick up when Monique's husband returned to the Florida estate.


It is Nick Williams who compromises some of the results of Dawson's undersea search because he has drunk too much and embroils himself in a brief tussle with a pair of naval intelligence officers at a night club.
Yet, it is Nick Williams, too, who has the foresight to return to the alien ship the gold trident that cradles the seeds for improved species of earth creatures including an improved strain of humans.
He argues that the human race as it is should be allowed to continue to learn from its challenges and grow to its potential rather than to be put into a secondary status by an improved super race.


Troy Jefferson is the bright, selfeducated electronics and programming genius nearly crushed by the early violent death of his older brother, He interacts well with Nick Williams and Carol Dawson personally, and his knowledge of electronics and diving are important to the development of the plot, He is the one kept longest in the submerged space ship by the aliens and is the one told what information and materials the aliens need, Thus, he plays a vital role in advancing the plot,

The video game he is programming, besides being Xrated, is ethnically sensitive, giving different responses to a player depending on the player's race, Jefferson is the target of racist comments by Ramirez, one of the Navy lieutenants investigating Carol Dawson's activity, However, since he and his girlfriend are the only significant blacks in a story involving mostly white characters, Jefferson serves only to "raise the consciousness" of a reader.
He does not seriously struggle with racism as an obstacle himself, nor does his race cause any significant change in the attitudes or actions of the other characters.


Troy Jefferson's girlfriend Angie Leatherwood is a successful pop singer, Her career has taken off, so she has fame and money that Troy himself has not yet achieved, although his video game has potential, The pair are in love but are separated by career interests, so the relationship is subdued,

Captain Homer Ashford and his bodybuilder assistant, Greta, serve as modest villains for the story, Formerly partners with Nick Williams and others in a venture that discovered a sunken treasure ship, Ashford and Greta managed to steal and hide a major portion of the gold.
They suspect Carol Dawson may have found another trove and interfere with her efforts both subtly and violently, Williams and Jefferson, however, find the gold Ashford has hidden and spirit away enough of it to meet the needs of the aliens, The evils which Ashford and Greta embody, thus,

are sufficient to provide some conflict in the plot but are not significant enough to draw important retribution,

Other antagonists to Carol Dawson, Nick Williams, and Troy Jefferson are Navy Commander Vernon Winters and his bumbling lieutenants, Todd and Ramirez, While Winters is in charge of the investigation of the loss of the Panther missile, his character serves more to explore struggles with a conservative and pietistic view of God.


Winters is one of the pilots who bombed Muammar Qaddafi's compound in Libya in thes, and he carries crippling guilt over the death of Qaddafi's little daughter.
He also undergoes a midlife crisis and guilt over his attraction to Tiffani Thomas, an appealing teenager who plays his love interest in the closing scene of a local theater production.
Todd and Ramirez directly interfere with Carol Dawson's search, suspecting that she and the others are cooperating with the Russians in an effort to find the lost missile.
The two young officers enact a stereotypical crudeness in their interrogations and pursuits, but ultimately learn nothing from their exposure to the aliens,

However, Commander Winters, once he sees and recognizes the scope of the alien technology, resolves his guilts and conflicts in a doxology, The marvels of the universe shown to him he takes as God speaking to him once more after a prolonged silence, In Winters's characterization, Clarke allows scientific discovery and even contact with aliens to be interpretable from a literalistic religious perspective,
Um míssil muito secreto que desaparece a meio do voo, Um estranho tridente de ouro que muda de forma, Uma caverna subaquática guardada por baleias, . . Há algo no fundo do oceano em Key West, Algo poderoso. Algo aterrador. Algo humano e espantosamente alienígena, Algo que pode destruir o futuro, Algo que está prestes a ser encontrado, "Berço" é uma aventura que se estende do passado desconhecido à fronteira do amanhã, do vasto oceano das estrelas ao fundo do mar, My goodness, the obsession with women's bodies! It totally gets in the way of what could've been an enjoyable, light scifi read, But the authors are so invested in reminding the reader that each female character is a Lady with Lady Parts that I sort of almost wished there had been no female characters at all at least then the authors could've got on with telling their alien artifact story.
The funniest part is how whenever two female characters are in a scene together they immediately get pitted against each other in rivalry over something to do with their looks oh my god Carol is nearly thirty, how is she still even alive.
It really reads like it's written by a fairly young male person who has had, shall we say, extremely limited exposure to adult social and intimate interactions.
Add to that the equally egregious inability to see nonwhite people as, you know, people I mean the black character continually whistles "ZipaDeeDooDah" like for real, and what you end up with is a story so badly told that it'd be funny if it weren't so boring.
I guess all I'm trying to say is that this book is a great example of how incredibly detrimental these prejudices are to the sheer "fun" quotient of a book of this kind.
It shouldn't try to be Virginia Woolf, but it should try to tell an entertaining and maybe even thoughtprovoking science fiction story, But the authors' weird hangups get in the way at pretty much at all times,

I've quite enjoyed some Clarke collaborations in the past I didn't hate his book with Stephen Baxter, and the one with Frederick Pohl was ok too but this one is just shockingly bad.
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