Rating: 
Summary: Don't judge this book by it's cover...
Review: ...because the cover art is the only thing good about it!!!! I read this piece of garbage, and the only thing that it did was to completely waste two of my evenings. Matt Reilly has got to be one of the worst authors that I have ever read. He makes up for poor research and lack of knowledge of what he is writing about with overuse of exclamation points, itallics, and absurd sequences of events. Mutant man eating elephant seals (mutated by the plutonium that produced the 2.71 gigawatt device that made the plane invisible)? Man eating killer whales? Liquid nitrogen Grenades? A top secret military instalation in Antartica where a plane with a cloaking device that makes it invisible was developed? A main character who in the course of the book took out elite French commandos, British SAS, (oh, I forgot, the whales ate most of the 'brits) and a whole host of American high ranking troops and officers? (including 6 F-22 aircraft) Who launches a missile from the inivsible plane with a 23 min timer on it so that it can wait to slam into the plane on the deck of an American aircraft carrier, destroying the plane, severely damaging the flight deck of the carrier, and killing the Admiral on the joint chiefs of staff, and then is laughinly "forgiven" by his friend who is the CO fo the carrier, because he thought the Admiral was an A*****e??!! The main character is literally making an ultra narrow escape every three or four pages. Please Matt Reilly go back to doing whatever it was you did before you began to write books, and hopefully this will save thousands from needless therapist visits to get over the suffering that your lame book causes.Oh, and all of the people who are praising this piece of dung with 4 and 5 stars either have never read the thing, or it's probably Matt Reilly himself (or his publisher) trying to bolster its terrible ratings.
Rating: 
Summary: Greatest & most vivid book ever SMART too
Review: Damn all the bad review of this book. As an X Files fan the idea of a spaceship is enough to get me to read it. This novel is detailed, fast paced and vivid WITH substance. I got this book for the Australian promotion read a book for AU$5 and the paperback quality it was printed on was superb. The best paperback material I have ever seen in my life. Read this book. You will end up caring for the characters. It's the best! What I really loved about it was how the words on paper created a vivid, descritptive and clear picture in my mind of what was happening in the book. For once reading a novel is better than watching a James Bond or Terminator 3 movie.
Rating:
Summary: Please make the dreams go away
Review: I really enjoyed reading about the destruction of a sub using a magnetic gun to shoot a grenade through an open missile hatch - UNDERWATER. I was so happy the scuba diving hero avoided the torpedos fired at him. I felt I was coasting on a new plane of consciousness. I guess I just felt proud of what I was spending my time on.
Rating: 
Summary: Ice Station chills with thrills
Review: The only reason I didn't give this non-stop-action thriller 5 stars, instead of four, was the believability factor. In many of the action scenes, you'll find yourself saying, "Oh, come on now, there's no way he, or she would survive that one". Still, it was A LOT OF FUN TO READ, so long as you suspend reality while enjoying the WILD RIDE of a book. The most fun I've had reading a book in quite a while. Jump out of a plane with no parachute, and you'll get an idea of how fast this book really moves! Wow!!!
Rating:
Summary: I Can't Believe this Got Printed!
Review: This started out to be a good book, but along about the time people started getting eaten by Killer Whales I began to have doubts. It wasn't too many pages after, when our trusty hero started wiping out British SAS forces left and right as he danced back and forth between racing hover craft, totally ignoring the laws of physics, that I just had to throw the book across the room. It became so UTTERLY impossible and stupid I just could not finish it. Don't waste your money, it is not even worth half a star.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Paper, and My Time...
Review: I wanted to like this novel -I really did. A military-flavored technothriller. A young Aussie author. I had such high hopes... The "See spot run. Run spot run" style is awful and amateurish -but not enough to make you stop reading. The pace is great, and he has a hook at each chapter end, to keep you page-turning. But it's the teeth-grindingly bad research that is this book's main fault. For technothrillers to work, an author must be especially careful to ground the work in reality -it is this grounding that allows the author to push the reader to accept improbable places and unlikely events. Unfortunately for his readers, Matt Reilly doesn't appear to understand the most basic laws of the world in which he lives. If it is mid afternoon in the Western US it can't be mid morning on the East Coast. If it is 6:30 AM in June in Antarctica it is dark. (At almost any time of a mid-winter's day it's dark). Solar Flares and Sun Spots are not the same thing, and UV radiation does not block radio, nor does it move like a weather front. If two vehicles are moving in the same direction at much the same speed, their relative velocity is zero (and therefore not a problem for "low-speed" missiles) If he can't get these things right, he hasn't got a hope with maghooks, liquid nitrogen grenades or the physics of hovercraft.
I do not blame Matt Reilly for this book -it's his editor who should have told him to go back and spend another year polishing it. And his editor should have picked up simple mistakes like RPMs and Hovercrafts. This is not the worst book I've ever read, but gee it comes close...
Rating: 
Summary: Fast-paced but flawed by implausibilities and errors
Review: The premise of this book is good; the action is almost non-stop; however, there are simply too many errors and implausibilities to recommend it as an example of a "science-based thriller". If you are able to completely suspend your rational thought processes, you may enjoy at least the action sequences in the book. It has the pace of, say, a James Bond movie. Unfortunately there are simply too many place where you find yourself groaning at the absurdity of something Reilly has written. A 1-cup sized liquid nitrogen grenade covering and freezing everything in a huge room with a gooey layer? Or that grenaded instantly freezing hundreds of tons of seawater? Hovercrafts that, at 80 mph, turn and stop on a dime? Being yanked to a stop after falling 150 feet and shooting a grappling hook into a ledge, and not losing your grip on the grappling gun? The big problem with the book is there are just SO MANY preposterous scenarios that you can never really buy into it. The entire thing ends up seeming like a comic book. If you are looking for a good technology based thriller, I'd recommend Mount Dragon by Preston and Child. Or any of their other books.
Rating:
Summary: Defrosted
Review: This is a movie script padded out with descriptions to make the minimum word count for the publisher. It's got all the obligatory scenes and characters required for a big screen action adventure movie that you stay for to the bitter end because you paid 10 bucks for the ticket: Cute kid, scary monsters (elephant seals that eat people so don't get your hopes up), sturdy hero, tough soldierette, lovable African American, etc. There's even a loyal dog, though in this case it's a seal and if anything it's cuter than the kid.
The hero overcomes all obsticles: Dozens of killer commandos, an evil conspiracy at the highest reaches of our government, sneaky scientists, and even (and I'm not joking here) a French submarine. But this is to be expected since the hero, like everyone else in this book, is an action figure and not even a believable literary creation.
I read this book, all the way through mind you, and I hated it.
I hated it because I spent time I could have used to pull weeds, iron shirts or done other housework that would have been far more satisfying.
I won't see the movie when it comes out. I won't even get the collectable drinking glass when it appears at my local Burger King.
Rating:
Summary: Die hard type
Review: Here they come, they are 20 and we are only 3! and they are the best trained men in the world, what are we gonna do?
... Some pages later all the enemies are dead and the heros walk away almost unscratched.
I'm sick of this!! Maybe it's ok for a movie but for a book? No way, what's the idea? Is Matthew Reilly trying to write a script for the next Die hard movie?
Rating: 
Summary: Great Action, but reads like a rough draft.
Review: I've got to hand it to Matt Reilly; this book draws you in and propels itself along at break-neck speed. I bought this book as a quick beach read, and that's what it was written for... a man's no-brainer action novel. I give it only three stars because the book seems to unravel in the second half. He uses the word "instantly" about fifty times, and the story seems to go too far over the top. It could have used a good editor. If you're looking for a fun, no-brainer, Ice Station fits the bill.
MJ
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