The incandescent ones

by Fred Hoyle

Young Peter, a student of Byzantine Art at Moscow University, receives, through a cryptic sentence in a lecture, a message to buy two books of his choice at a specific hour in the University bookshop. When he opens the package, a third book has been included. It is this third book which sends Peter on a series of adventures leading to the unravelling of a mysterious power source guiding the destinies of planet Earth. His quest is also intimately linked with his father's baffling disappearance.Once again the Hoyles have succeeded in combininig an enjoyable piece of story-telling with scientific speculation of lasting interest.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

183 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Professor Sir Fred Hoyle was one of the most distinguished, creative, and controversial scientists of the twentieth century. He was a Fellow of St John’s College (1939-1972, Honorary Fellow 1973-2001), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957, held the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy (1958-1972), established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge (now part of the Institute of Astronomy), and (in 1972) received a knighthood for his services to astronomy.

Hoyle was a keen mountain climber, an avid player of chess, a science fiction writer, a populariser of science, and the man who coined the phrase 'The Big Bang'.

Reviews

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow, I remember liking this a lot more when I read it as a boy. Now...not so much. The prose is the drab, serviceable sort that mediocre-but-competent writers from the British isles seem to specialise in, the characterisation is nonexistent and the plot doesn't seem to actually do much despite a few interesting ideas and a final build to a somewhat sensawunda-ish ending. As for the espionage plot, I've read better and it's all a little inconclusive in the end. The sex bits are downright embarrassing. I was planning to re-read some of the Hoyles' SF based on my fond memories of them, I hope the rest of them offer a little more on second glance than this one did.

[Blarg · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not good. I originally picked it up as a teenager in a public library and for years I had forgotten it entirely. But somewhere in the back of my brain I remembered the intriguing colors of the physical book and I wanted to re-read it. It was a short and fairly pointless story about a guy living in a cold war type world of intelligence agencies trying to understand alien species that was providing beams of power to both the United States and Russia, from space. The story followed this one guy who was actually an alien although he did not realize it. He started off skiing with some kind of special battery that he was supposed to transport across the Russian border. Throughout the story he was helped by various people who maddeningly refused to tell him anything about why they were helping him or what is objective was. He eventually wound up on Mars and then being transported near to Jupiter where he was put on some kind of space skis and circled Jupiter until he merged with the alien consciousness. There was no explanation of why.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually love to read these little books by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle. I got hooked on them years ago when I found several of them in a box from my dad's younger days. The best of the Hoyles are very good sci-fi. This one, however, is consistently disappointing. It reads a bit like a bad spy film, and, in fact, that is probably what it is trying to be. It saddens me to think that this book from the late 70s represents something of the decline and fall of these authors, who I have admired so far.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because there isn't much. The picture on the cover kind of exemplifies what to expect. There is a guy with a bad 70s perm turning into stars. It's a dopey picture and incomprehensible. It fits this book perfectly. This book relishes its twists. The main character is always deferring revelations until later, mainly in order that he not remove the book's few moments of excitement. But even these artificial moments of suspense fall flat. This is the kind of book that Vonnegut would despise, his rule being that you should tell everything up front and make the way you tell the story be what matters, not the soap-opera-y revelation of plot points.

One of the Hoyles was actually a renowned physicist, and the other was a more literary type. I recall enjoying the way that other books of their reveal the important scientific foundation of the story, but this book avoids that. Instead, we get 130 pages of pseuco-spy twists and 20 pages of lousy, uninspiring scientifically driven plot. After all that wait, they end was pretty unsatisfying.

If you want to read good books by the Hoyles, I really enjoyed October the First Is Too Late and The Black Cloud. I would avoid this one though.

[Robert Lomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fred Hoyle is a story teller who invents stories based in scientific fact and when he writes with his son, their characters have greater depth. The world the Hoyles' create in this novel is set in a technically plausible future and deals with an on-going interest of Hoyle Senior in the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life and how humanity might react if forced to interact with it.
In this book you will be taken to a world strangely similar to our own, yet with a shadowy presence of alien science and alien politics, hiding just below the surface.
The hero gets involved with this alien culture and discovers remarkable truths about himself and the human condition.
My only real complaint it that it finishes too soon. I was left wondering what would happen after the hero makes contact with these hidden powers, but then again perhaps posing that question was the intent of the book.
It's a good read, well up to the Hoyles' best storytelling standards, but raises more questions that it answers.

[Kara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aliens tend to fall into one of two categories – those who are curious about humans and those who are smug about not being human.

The curious ones tend to live longer, thankfully, since the smug ones are annoying to be around.

So, our smug alien narrator is fairly grating to be stuck with the entire book.

It’s an odd story – a weird mash up of E.T. and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

[Paul Holland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the strongest Hoyle book. The first half is a decent enough spy story and the hard sci-fi is certainly solid (and it's fun to read about Jupiter's four moons, a fact which ages the story along with the fact it's set in a bipolar world of East and West power blocks)... but if you really want to immerse yourself in Hoyle's cold, paternalistic prose, I'd dive into The Black Cloud.

[SciFiOne]

1978 no grade recorded