The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

Now, near the end, we're finally leaving all the meandering exposition and getting back to the whole asteroid business that we left back in Chapter 5.

"Already it was difficult to remember life before Kali." How can it be difficult, when you've just spent 30 chapters rambling on and on about life before Kali?

Clarke uses every trick he can think of here to avoid dialogue and to disguise an essay as a novel. People make speeches, a class attends a lecture, a pope writes an encyclical, a captain gives a briefing, a girl views a display at Disneyland. When there is "dialogue" it's usually just a monologue. He also makes the mistake of describing some older novels about Mars, which sound so much more interesting than this.

This author, unlike Grubb, knows the difference between "poring" and "pouring". And unlike Clarke or Gibbins, he also knows how to tell a story!

Here Clarke finally breaks from his interminable essay, and deigns to grace us with a few scattered lines of what could, if one were feeling generous, be termed "dialogue" between "characters".

This is ridiculous. Still nothing but exposition and infodumps for the past 8 chapters, and no sign of a return of any characters, dialogue, or plot!

Chapter after chapter of nothing but infodumps!

As in his other writing, the only female character gets, at best, one scene with dialogue, and then she's barely mentioned at all for the rest of her short existence.

We were just involved in a mission to deflect a killer asteroid away from its direct path to Earth, but now we've flashed back to an extremely perfunctory instalove romance between underdeveloped characters amid the space Olympics.

Finally booting this garbage off my "currently reading" list. A crappy book with a crappy ending. But there's one particularly self-relevant quote from the epilogue: "Complete failure to get excited about anything."

So far this looks like it's falling into the exact same patterns as before. There's still plenty of time to be pleasantly surprised, but...

Giving Clarke one last chance.

Finally a breakthrough in communication! (And the development of an ugly jealousy from Clayton.)

Most people who talk about this book call one of the characters a "genie", but he's actually just the ghost of an ancient ascetic philosopher, who happens to reside in a jug.

Jane is from Baltimore, Maryland.

This was a surprise! In Chapter 15, Jane comes a hair's breadth to committing suicide with a revolver and taking her nanny with her, to escape a slower and more painful death by a lioness! This is in the 1914 edition, but it seems to have been surgically removed from later editions, but I don't know when.

Here we have some comic relief from the bumbling, absent-minded professor and his sidekick.

At last we see the arrival of Professor Porter, Jane, and William Clayton!