Book Review: Beyond the Ice Limit (Audio)

This is the second "Gideon Crew" book I have read, but I happened to start with The Lost Island, which falls in the middle of that series.  It is also the third book by Douglas Preston; he and Lincoln Child coauthored the Gideon Crew series.  Most of the general comments from The Lost Island thus apply to this book as well.  Fortunately, my review of Lost City of the Monkey God is not very relevant -- perhaps because this book is fiction, or perhaps because it does not treat a subject of serious academic interest, or perhaps because it is coauthored, the political posturing is not really present here.  Warning:  Spoilers ahead.

Genuinely original science fiction is hard to come by these days, and you won't really find it here.  Here are some echoes that I heard in this book.

• Human choices can be modeled with great accuracy, from Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series.
• Luckiness is a real attribute of some people, from Larry Niven's Ringworld.
• A plant/animal/?? from outer space eats people and threatens to take over the world, from a lot of places, but Little Shop of Horrors comes to mind.
• An alien tries to communicate with whales, from Star Trek IV.
• Snake-like aliens enter people's heads and control them, again from many possible sources, but most notably from Stargate SG-1.

The originality of the components is not so important as the way they are combined, though.  On that score, this is a decent story.

A few other flaws are worthy of note.

• Everyone agrees that the ship Rolvaag (which occurred in an earlier book, The Ice Limit) was blown apart when the seed came in contact with salt water, resulting in the death of most of the crew.  Everyone also agrees that this is the fault of Eli Glinn, for refusing to drop the seed into the salt water in order to lighten the ship.  Despite the number of geniuses involved, no one notices the obvious conclusion that the explosion would have happened anyway, this time with no one having made it to the lifeboats.
• Since everyone was convinced that the alien was very dangerous, there is no way the initial exploration would have been by manned submersibles a few dozen feet from it.  They come with 5 manned submersibles but only 1 remotely operated vehicle, which they intend to use only to deploy a bomb!  Reversing the numbers would make more sense.  The characters are supposed to be too smart to make this kind of mistake.
• The alien is supposed to harvest brains on planets when it arrives; it enslaves them for "computing power". It is a safe assumption that brains evolved on different planets would have very different structures.  How is an organism that needs other brains intelligent enough to understand, preserve alive, and incorporate brains completely unrelated to it?
• The alien seems to be rather flexible in the size of brains it uses.  Why did it not make use of whale and dolphin brains?
• One of the characters was in the process of deciphering Blue Whale language by comparing whale vocalizations to their circumstances.  The alien is supposed to have done this without being able to sense their circumstances.  That should not be possible, no matter how intelligent the alien might be.
• Conservation of energy seems not to be in play in this universe.
  • The shell of the seed is supposed to be made of a superheavy element (number 177) from the hypothetical "island of stability". Even if this element is truly stable (which is unlikely -- "stability" is a relative term for high-atomic-mass elements), it would be nowhere abundant. The creature would have to expend a huge amount of energy to make enough for millions or billions of seeds, each with a mass of thousands of tons. Where would this energy come from?
  • Contrary to what Eli Glinn suggests, throwing the bulk of a planet's crust into space is not more efficient than throwing only the seeds into space.  Nor is there enough energy available on a planet to disrupt it that way.
  • The "goa'uld" do not eat, but they move energetically.  Where do they get their energy?
• Early in the book, a sex scene is described in more detail than some (myself included) may find comfortable.  The encounter does help drive the plot, but it need not be so explicitly described.

So again, this is not great literature to read.  It has just enough crazy ideas, though, and enough redundancy in exposition to make it a good book to listen to on a long drive.