Terminal Event

I don't remember why I got this book. I must have seen it somewhere and thought the plot was intriguing, and maybe I just wanted to continue reading through the pattern of books with the same starry cover:


The cover was my favourite part of this book. Throughout, I kept thinking about how great the plot was and how much I would have really liked it if it had been written by somebody else. When I looked up the author, I found that he only writes historical westerns/romances so this must be his first foray into sci-fi, so I'm willing to be lenient but maybe just say stick with what you know.

The science in this book, as mentioned by many of the other low-star reviews, was pretty lacking. If the impact was going to be devastating enough to destroy all traces of life and civilization, then there's no possible way that the results of the genetic seeding or the sphinx could have survived. This is an ancient civilization with nuclear capabilities, they've built buildings and cities that presumably rival or at least match our own, there's no way all of that was destroyed with no trace and yet one stone sculpture manages to weather the millennia. I was really irked by the continuous mentions of “the three races” as if it's been proven and all of society accepts that there are three races only and that's that. They are white, black, and Asian, by the way, if you were wondering. Even disregarding the idea that race is a social construct and not a biological organization, do South Asian people fall under Asian? What about Hispanic people? What about Indigenous peoples? And especially the idea that you can do a DNA test on some embryos to find that they're all exactly 33.3% white, black, and Asian is laughable. I am willing to suspend SOME disbelief when it comes to The Before Time because who knows how they evolved but we're also supposed to accept that they and we are the same type of human so I guess I'm not that willing after all. ALSO it blows my mind that this one dude could've come up with this method of accelerated aging in what, a few weeks? He didn't even test it, he just built it in hoping it would work!! It could have killed the surrogate mothers! The children could have ended up braindead or had multiple physical and mental disabilities!

I'm not totally down with the stereotypical characters either. The whip-smart, handsome college professor and the gorgeous, hard-hitting reporter have a romance both inevitable and boring as heck. They're that couple that you're like, okay, WE GET IT you love each other just please have a fight or something already. The conversations between all characters are written so stilted and unlike any person has ever spoken. I've never in my life heard anyone say “One would think so, wouldn't one?” And it's not even just one character with a quirky way of speaking. Also if I have to read “Ava laughed”, “The others laughed”, “Everyone laughed” one more time I'm going to never laugh again. There are better ways to get across someone's charm.

A bunch of stuff about The Before Time really chafed, like all the made-up names and the way that some words were different - like using the word "stel" for "star" because that's the The Before Time word for "star" but we can safely assume that everything we're reading has been translated into English for our benefit so why not just say STAR? I did like that hubris and one man's greed took down the ancient civilization. One last thing that really irked me was just one line when our heroes were talking to the owner of the restaurant about providing their "biological contribution" to re-seed the Earth and they asked if he'd done it: "'I did...My mother-in-law thinks she has as well, but I took care of that. Whatever future life is spawned upon this planet will be spared any rebirth of Lazina Coroway. And if they had ever known her, they would thank me for it.' Both Zorlok and Vilna laughed as Gnonloma left their table." HAHAHA HOW HILARIOUS that he took away this woman's agency regarding the most important thing of everyone's lives right now??? I imagine that this is very important to many people, facing the death of their entire civilization and everyone and everything they've ever known, to be able to leave some part of themselves behind, to believe that maybe their existence wasn't just for nothing and that they can hope that something of them will continue on into the future. That's got to be a pretty profound thought and sounds extremely moving. And this woman apparently put her trust in her son-in-law to carry out this process and he betrayed her. PLUS the GREAT PUNISHMENT for the man who condemned everyone to this fate in the first place because of his greed and assholery is that he is not allowed to leave his genetic material behind! And here are these folks just laughing about a mean ol' mother-in-law being denied the chance to, in some sense, live again after the destruction of her entire world.

So. I don't know much about Robert Vaughan's historical novels but I'll likely stay away from any future sci-fi that he writes.