评论
In the Retro Hugo Award–nominated novel that inspired the Syfy miniseries, alien invaders bring peace to Earth—at a grave price.
Like a lot of others, this book had been sitting on my bookshelf for some considerable time! So glad I have final dusted it off and read it. A good read overall, it will be interesting to see this adapted into the forthcoming TV mini series.
This book was both boring and interesting. The ending 10 chapters were good but everything else bored me.
I am not a big reader of sci-fi, but I enjoy reading works by the masters of the genre (Clarke, Wells, Verne, Dick, etc). This book has forced me to conclude that Arthur C. Clarke's mind was certainly not of the ordinary variety. This was the first book of Clarke's outside of the Odyssey series that I have read, so I didn't know what exactly to expect. This book is one of the most profound works of fiction, not just science-fiction, to come out of the 20th Century.This novel deals with many of Clarke's prevalent themes, especially the relationship between spirituality and science, the course of human evolution, and the effects of humanity making contact with an alien race. The writing is slow and deliberate; by that I mean every sentence is carefully crafted to gently lead the reader in the right direction. Clarke does a fantastic job though of pushing the story into unexpected directions. At the start of the third section, "The Last Generation," I was completely clueless about the direction he was taking. It wasn't until the last 100 pages (or "screens" since it was an ebook), when Karellen gave his final speech, that the point of the story finally clicked. The final scene, which I will not give away, fits perfectly with the title of the book.I am hesitant to say that this is a great science-fiction novel. This is a story of the human condition, what the human mind is capable of, and the ultimate fate of our species told through the vehicle of science-fiction. As I have mentioned previously, this is one of the great novels, period, of the twentieth century.