NEVERNESS

Rating:
Summary: Neverness is brilliant, complicated, mind boggedly Sci Fi.
Review: I have not even read all the book yet. But it is brilliant.

I'm afraid I have'nt read much Sci Fi in my time. I usually find it far too technical for me. But, Zindell in this novel, manages to, not only tell a fantasic tale, he also explains rather detailed therioes in a simple way.

I would recomend this book to any Sci Fi fan, of course. But also, anybody who is like me and just loves an excellent read.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent world-building and writing--unfocused plot.
Review: I pretty much concur with the other reader's raves--this is a very fine piece of epic, worldbuilding SF. Zindell's writing is miles ahead of most of the genre's writers. The book's structure has some problems, however--it reads like two or three tacked-together short novels, and not much happens for long stretches of pages towards the middle and end. Also, I must point out the book's similarities to Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun." Zindell uses several similar devices in the same way as that extraordinary work, and it bothered me. But don't take my word for it--read them both.

Rating:
Summary: excellent unexpected gem
Review: I'd never heard of this book or its author until a few months ago and I decided to order this book. I was very pleased with my purchase. Zindell writes in a clean crisp unpretentious style while at the same time remaining philosophic and poetic. The story is well paced and veried, the characters well fleshed out and occasionally hilarious. The gritty interplay between Soli and Mallory is intense at times, while the remarks of Bardo often had me in stiches at times. When I read the back of the book and it started talking about star gods and giant space computers I thought "oh no here we go again". I was expecting a cliched old version of the unfathomable super computer. Instead these sections are handled delicately and expertly and leave the reader feeling reasonably satisfied. The sections with the Alaloi are a nice contrast and the ending of the book is every bit as good as you may hope it to be, something that rarely happens with scifi books nowadays.

Rating:
Summary: amazing
Review: I've read science fiction all my life. Some good some less than mediocre. I'll give you a couple sentences on the key authors. If you agree with these, you'll appreciate my opinion of David Zindell. Isaac Asismov - Each book revolves around one very good concept. The text is mainly soap opera filler. Ray Bradbury - completely predictable. No surprises, but at times enjoyable. Arthur C. Clarke - Insightful ideas. Has something important to say once every couple of hundred pages. Kim Stanley Robinson - Great (concept) books. Way too many words wasted on social dialog. Almost no science. Inconsistencies in the various technologies used. Greg Bear - Beyond his time. Very insightful and enjoyable reading. He knows this is true and to make his mark, at times (Slant) he gets as bizaare and dirty as he can. Some of the great respect a person can have for him is diminished. Frank Herbert - Worthwhile reading if a person is willing to read through thousands of pages to get the full picture (I was - In the end his work is elegant. All loose end are neatly tied.) E. E. Doc Smith - Some of the first science fiction I ever read. Considering it was written in the 1940's it's absolutely amazing.

I've read countless other authors. Some very bad, some good. I'd have to say that all of them spend most of their time typing filler. The worst is the endless social dialog. Every science fiction book I've ever read has someone biting their lower lip until it bleeds --> She wore a pink blouse and pensive look and looked hot that day and blah blah blah, yaddah yaddah yaddah. Enough to get a reader good at skimming through the pages.

Now I come to David Zindell. This author is a true genius. Not just your normal genius that has the ability to confuse and amaze people, he speaks to the heart of the person who knows science and loves science fiction. I just finished his book NEVERNESS. This is the first time, possibly ever, that I didn't have to skip scores of pages to get to the point. Every sentence this author writes astounds me. How one person can hold such a breadth of knowledge and insight I'll never know. If you are knowledeable in science and have a longing to understand life (with the depth to appreciate wisdom), read this book. What I wouldn't give to have an hour to speak with a person like David Zindell.

Rating:
Summary: amazing
Review: I've read science fiction all my life. Some good some less than mediocre. I'll give you a couple sentences on the key authors. If you agree with these, you'll appreciate my opinion of David Zindell. Isaac Asismov - Each book revolves around one very good concept. The text is mainly soap opera filler. Ray Bradbury - completely predictable. No surprises, but at times enjoyable. Arthur C. Clarke - Insightful ideas. Has something important to say once every couple of hundred pages. Kim Stanley Robinson - Great (concept) books. Way too many words wasted on social dialog. Almost no science. Inconsistencies in the various technologies used. Greg Bear - Beyond his time. Very insightful and enjoyable reading. He knows this is true and to make his mark, at times (Slant) he gets as bizaare and dirty as he can. Some of the great respect a person can have for him is diminished. Frank Herbert - Worthwhile reading if a person is willing to read through thousands of pages to get the full picture (I was - In the end his work is elegant. All loose end are neatly tied.) E. E. Doc Smith - Some of the first science fiction I ever read. Considering it was written in the 1940's it's absolutely amazing.

I've read countless other authors. Some very bad, some good. I'd have to say that all of them spend most of their time typing filler. The worst is the endless social dialog. Every science fiction book I've ever read has someone biting their lower lip until it bleeds --> She wore a pink blouse and pensive look and looked hot that day and blah blah blah, yaddah yaddah yaddah. Enough to get a reader good at skimming through the pages.

Now I come to David Zindell. This author is a true genius. Not just your normal genius that has the ability to confuse and amaze people, he speaks to the heart of the person who knows science and loves science fiction. I just finished his book NEVERNESS. This is the first time, possibly ever, that I didn't have to skip scores of pages to get to the point. Every sentence this author writes astounds me. How one person can hold such a breadth of knowledge and insight I'll never know. If you are knowledeable in science and have a longing to understand life (with the depth to appreciate wisdom), read this book. What I wouldn't give to have an hour to speak with a person like David Zindell.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best sf books I ever read
Review: If you are a SF fan and enjoy "hard" reading. Then you are doing yourself a great diservice if you dont read this book. I have been looking for more books by Mr. Zindell and have finally found him on Amazon.com...

Rating:
Summary: Awesome.
Review: Neverness is definitely among the best SF books I have ever read. I think the world David Zindell has created is the best realised since Dune, and I think that anyone into SF should read it.

Rating:
Summary: A Novel Thick with High Thought. . .
Review: Not since the Dune series, or the Childe Cycle have I found such compelling characters and a richly developed Universe. The world of Neverness takes post- or trans- humanism to new heights, exploring the nature of man, the nature of God, or gods, and the relationship between them. The only thing I have to say in the negative, is that the book may be intimidating to unprepared readers. The depth to which the author takes both the realism and the conceptual philosophy are staggering, which I found to be enthralling, but others may find it to be a turn off. The intesity of the plot and the humanity of even the most otherworldly characters, however make even trudging through the filth and squalor of a caveman's world, which is visited in depth, interesting and intellectually stimulating. Give it a read. It's more than worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Caution
Review: One should be careful to criticize the book that the author wrote rather than what you wish he wrote. Since Zindell is billed as a *hard SF* writer, I should say how well he fits that bill.

He doesn't. Hard SF depends on the realistic depiction of future science based on what we know today. While Zindell sprinkles his text with the vocabulary of mathematics, he does so with so little motivation that the story would actually make more sense if it had been written as a fantasy, with *manifolds* and *theorems* replaced by *spells* and *incantations*.

The book is heavily laden with philosophizing: about 30% of it, I'd say. And there are frequent digressions that do nothing to further the plot.

Finally, although the story leads you along promising the solution to a grand puzzle at the end, the conclusion is anticlimatic and not at all clever.

Rating:
Summary: Poetry and mathematics
Review: Science fiction is a crappy genre. It has potential, but unfortunatly the oly ones to write it seem to be spoty adolecents that never grew up (the author of neverness being an exeption) Nothing good has come out of it in the last 100 years, people who say differently should read joyce, beckett, proust, homer, dante, shakespear and the other greats. neverness, however is different. It is the only good science fiction ever written. Dune was fun by shallow, as was hyperion, ender's game and the rest. they will be forgotten in 50 years. neverness is brilliant. The use of philosophy from nietzche, russell, shophenhaure, and others is breath taking. He is the first science-fiction written to have any good grasp of great literature. the use of the 5000 year old "the Epic of Gilgamesh" as a representation of a literal caharcter was inventive, the use of the poetry of William Black's poem "the tygar" to highlight the eternal nature of human kind whilst the main character is piloting through an infinitly greater entity, and the quoting of the poetry of Emily dickenson by the warrior poets (also taken from the 700 year old "villand Saga" from iceland) is brilliant. The goal of all great writing is to comment profoundly on human life. Science fiction does not do this, but neverness does. the charcter realises, as we do, that humanity will never change, and reamins as barbaric as always, despite many increaes in other fields, we still remain clever apes. There is to much to write about in this review here, so i will leave the rest up to the intelligent and well-read reader. unfortunatly, this book will not last, because the science-fiction audience that its genre attracts claim it as "boring" and "a rip off from dune" (A chapter from Neverness has more to say about human kind that Dune ever has) and will not pick up what a brilliant work it is, because they have not done the real reading that creates a scholarly and well-read individual. Serious readers will not read it because of its damning place as a science fiction piece (a genre that at the moment no serious reader should bother with).