Rating: 
Summary: Too many false stops, but still enjoyable
Review: To clear up any confusion - Arthur C. Clarke wrote a plot synopsis that he wasn't interested in pursuing. Mike McQuay read the synopsis and fleshed it out into the novel Richter 10. The novel takes place in the near future. The story: a geologist named Lewis Crane is obsessed with stopping earthquakes by fusing the Earth's plates together. To this end, he starts a foundation to predict quakes and render assistance to victims. He comes into conflict with his own employees and a seperatist group called the Nation of Islam (NOI) led by an African American of great charisma. One of Crane's men leaves to join the NOI, setting up the main conflict for the remainder of the novel.There are some obvious parallels with real life - for example, the leader of the NOI is obviously based on Elijah Mohammed, while the defecting geologist is similar to (but less influential than) Malcolm X. The vision of the future is quite dystopic (and overtly racist) - the U.S. government is a puppet for multinational (Chinese) corporations. However, the novel is not a warning or historical analogy, but simply an adventure story with lots of buildings falling over and tsunamis sweeping people out to sea. On the whole, it is quite enjoyable. The action is well-written, the technology mostly believable, and the supporting characters well-developed. Unfortunately, the main characters are generally not likable (until, possibly, in the last 50 pages), so it's hard to develop any kind of sympathy for them. In addition, the central scientific tool the geologists use - a working scale model of the Earth - is extremely far fetched. The idea that an earthquake (or any major natural event) could be predicted by a 100-foot model, to an accuracy of a couple of minutes, stretches credulity to the breaking point. Finally, there are too many Big Moments in the book. There are at least 3 points where the story reached a logical conclusion, but then went on, basically starting over with a new theme. It makes the story seem very patchwork, (in the one particular chapter, 10 years pass!) Sure, it's supposed to be an epic, but it's too choppy. Having said all that, the book is still fun and keeps you interested.
Rating:
Summary: RICHTER 10, RATING 3
Review: When this book eventually gets into its stride it's a lot better than you might think to begin with. Sir Arthur took to outsourcing his narratives with the later volumes of the Rama series, and at first I thought this was going to be as bad as those were. I reread it in the aftershock of the tsunami disaster of 12/26/04, something I wouldn't otherwise have done.
Clarke's true genius in fiction is as a short-story writer, and it seems to me that the great Childhood's End was the only real full-length novel he had in him. Even it hardly runs to 200 pages. The City and the Stars is slightly longer, but it is a reworking of an earlier 'novella' and gets a bit too big for its boots; and such productions as The Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama itself are stretched to the limits of what he is comfortable with. Subcontracting was one answer, and this story is based on an outline plot by Clarke (provided at the back) fleshed out to full standard novel length by Mike McQuay. The opening chapters are bloodsome - stilted dialogue, cardboard cutouts of characters and the event that triggered the environmental disaster which forms the basis of the plot given to one of the characters to 'tell', in a plonking and ludicrous way, to other characters who must have known all about it in the first place. Matters then improve as the scientific issues take centre stage. This was really Clarke's secret. He deserves no less an accolade than as one of the major educators of our age, bringing physics and astronomy to the masses. Even in his fiction he is always didactic, always explaining this or that scientific issue or correcting popular misapprehensions. Once the science takes control of the narrative, the characterisation here becomes less important, more like the routine way Clarke himself handles it. The basic scenarios may seem fantastic and contrived, but the story is about what they would be like in real life (and real death on a large scale) supposing they did happen. One would not assess Stapledon on some basis of 'realism' and I for one am not inclined to assess his admirer Clarke on any such basis either. There is a real vision behind it all, an imaginative world. The disasters here are small beer indeed by comparison with Stapledon, and of course Clarke starts from a sound scientific grasp, something Stapledon never pretended to, and pushes the envelope to a certain extreme. How extreme he is really being I wouldn't like to judge, and not just because of recent events. This planet is a dynamic and unquiet thing.
Even the political background, which seems to border on farcical in the opening chapters, begins to fit in a little more as the book proceeds and as McQuay begins to take some recognisable stance of his own regarding it. I have no idea whether earthquakes can really be predicted let alone stopped, but if that gave us the opportunity to do something useful with the nukes at long last there would be two major benefits not one. The Richter 10 event is scheduled to take place shortly before my own 119th birthday, so I am unlikely to be a victim of it. Even my children are likely to be too old to care by then, whether or not southern California is by that time as familiar a stamping-ground of theirs as it already is of mine. I must say the thought of earthquakes is always somewhere at the back of my mind during my visits to Los Angeles. How this book will affect my thinking on any future visit I don't know, but I now have some elementary do's and don'ts to bear in mind from an informed source, much good may they do me.
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