Review: Interesting.....
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2013
First - good things - enjoyable characters, intense plot, excellent scientific descriptions, generally good writing.Second - the bad - the book is a weird combination of an English author with an American English twist.  A lot of the words, phrases, and references are definitely from the UK, but once in a while there is a reference that is 100% American.  Kind of weird to read.  Also any time there is a character from somewhere in the southern US or the Caribbean the written dialogue (which I am confident was trying for authenticity) is written in dialect that makes it almost impossible to read.  This is really, really distracting.Third - the confusing - the author does an excellent job developing the Armageddon part of the book, however the last 10% of the book is a unneeded add on.  If the author had ended it about 10% sooner I would have been intrigued enough to read a sequel.  I won't offer a spoiler but this ending was not well designed, more like someone's fantasy that they needed to share with their reading audience.  As it stands, I am not sure I will - it will definitely depend on the book itself, since unfortunately Mr. Clarke cannot in a sequel (I guess he could if he wanted to defy logic) erase the current ending of this one, and I actually would like to know a little more about Professor Barnes and Heather.I do recommend this to anyone who is a fan of hard science fiction, and/or apocalyptic fiction - but you really do need to understand some basic physics and chemistry to understand this novel.