Review: Chilling short story, very taut
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2011
This story reminded me of Asimov and Bradbury, both of whom regularly produced short stories that could as easily have been expanded to novel length. Jacobs' story here only briefly touches the science, business, and political aspects and the societal impact of the discovery in order to bring it to its inexorable ending, and frankly I would have liked to see more, but it also works very well as presented. I was very pleased to get the sense that the scientific details had been thought through and that the brevity was for the sake of brevity, rather than brevity for the sake of hand-waving the pesky details away!The characterization does suffer a little from the brevity (also a failing for Bradbury and Asimov) but it is not the primary emphasis. The plot is very well-structured and this was literally a page-turner (page-clicker?) as I was eager to see what was next.Highly recommended.