Blurbs: Maelstrom

Pro

Con

Watts has grown into a powerful sf voice in the space of only two books. [Maelstrom] comes with a vastly more complex setting than its predecessor... the increase in dramatic effect is exponential. With its worst-case-scenario setting and thoroughly compelling characters, Maelstrom delivers on all the promises hard SF has ever thought to make, bundling future science and a suspenseful story into a single thrilling package.

Watts has expanded his focus without diminishing the obsessive drive of his plotting or his prose. [His] vision of the near future offers scant reason for hope. What makes his novel exhilarating instead of depressing is the conviction and control he brings to his material -- I have no hesitation in recommending both books to readers interested in up-to-date science fiction with a seriously paranoid edge.

Watts moves from the relentless pressure of Starfish to the frantic speed of chaos in action, never losing the tight focus on his fascinating characters in this excellent sequel to his debut novel.

Watts's hard-boiled prose screams along, nothing to step it down...Lifting Maelstrom beyond cyber-conspiracy are Watts's convincing writing, his killer pacing, and the delicate secondary themes: is free will more than a chemical chimera, a dosable network routing impulses through the meat of the brain? Do the needs of some theoretical all have to trump the rights of the visible individual? What is the cost of mortals playing God? All this, plus a twist—Watts invents false-memory syndrome volume 2.0 (shades of Philip K. Dick)—that turns Starfish inside out: this is speculative fiction of maximum wattage.

Maelstrom brilliantly and grippingly transcends its parts...this is, to say the least, a vision at the opposite pole from much hard-sf. But the darkness of his vision shouldn't put readers off seeing Watts's future. It's one you cannot take your eyes off.

On first reading, some of the characters can seem undifferentiated... Maelstrom flickers between its storylines too often for comfort. (Comfort, of course, is the last thing that Watts wants to give his readers.)

[Peter Watts] is a hard science fiction writer through and through—and one of the very best alive, a peer of writers such as Neil Stephenson, Allen Steele, and the Three Gregs, Benford, Bear and Egan. Hard sf writers rarely create characters as complex and appealing—or as ethically tortured—as the ones who tumble tragically through Mr. Watts's Maelstrom.

Maelstrom ultimately remains a novel about humanity and how humanity behaves in extreme circumstances. Both as a sequel to Starfish and as a novel on its own, Maelstrom is a gripping read.

Author Peter Watts has created a compelling and convincingly dark view of the future. Extrapolating today's headlines into the near future, Watts' vision rings frighteningly authentic…Fans of dystopic science fiction will find Maelstrom a hotbed of ideas, concerns, and partially explored moral consequences. Love it or hate it, Maelstrom is a fascinating and powerful novel.

Maelstrom is an issues novel and suffers from one of the problems endemic to this kind of book--its characters lack full development and are difficult to identify with. Watts tries to overcome this by giving deep-sea survivor Lenie Clark a truly interesting background, yet he is only partially successful in this attempt.

[Watts'] fiction exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance... these two novels are state-of-the art SF. And best of all, Maelstrom does not merely repeat the successes of Starfish but extends them into new territory, thus giving hope that Watts is no mere one-hit wonder.

It's now officially a cliché to label anyone "the new Heinlein," so I won't do so here. But I will say that this is a novel Heinlein would have endorsed.

I admire dark novels, and this is about as dark as they come -- from the trashed and crisis-wracked landscape of 22nd century North America, to the vast corporations that engineer people as routinely as equipment...Bleak as this vision is, it's balanced by the spare vividness of Watts' prose, the fascination of his speculations, and the subtlety of his characters... Especially compelling is the treatment of Lenie's semi-mythic metamorphosis from survivor to Meltdown Madonna...The epilogue, evoking the great destruction and stubborn love of which human beings are simultaneously capable, is perfect.

The ending, where too many things seem to happen too quickly and some threads are dropped, is the weakest part of the book.

Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour. With its chaotically alive portrayal of the World Wide Web and its disturbing ruminations on the uses of conscience, Maelstrom is a dark, sardonic, and uncompromisingly moral book. I strongly disagreed with many of its despairing, deterministic conclusions about human behaviour and motivations, but for the duration of this excellently-wrought fictional argument, I found myself willing to grant Watts his premises so that I could keep turning the pages.

Peter Watts has seen the future, and if it's not murder, it's the next closest thing—[He] examines nearly every single one of our current nightmares, and extrapolates past them. Watts shows us a frightening world, most terrifying because of its plausibility. As a whole, Maelstrom certainly equals the general atmosphere of doom and despair and events out of control of [John Brunner's] The Sheep Look Up, and the scientific basis for Watts' statements are up-to-the-minute and well documented. Can a book change the world? After having read Maelstrom, I can only hope so.

Dramatically, Maelstrom has less going for it than thematically. One of the main plot twists is essentially a latecoming reverberation to the central perfidy of Starfish, depending on Starfish for emotional depth.

An eerie journey of revenge and salvation. This sequel to Starfish depicts a dystopic near-future, where cyberspace and real space interact and unique life forms emerge from the depths of the ocean to claim their place in the world. A good choice for most sf collections.

This sequel to Canadian Watts's well-received debut novel, Starfish, delivers more of the same exciting hard SF adventure and imaginative plot. . .Watts has a deft touch with the complex storyline, full of unique characters, both human and non-human, trapped in an all-too-possible future.

The premise is interesting, the humour dark...unexpected plot twists and an ending that is complete in itself, while, naturally, leaving the door open for a third in the series.

The wise reader will read Starfish before picking up Maelstrom. Watts is most unhelpful in getting us up to speed about what went before as the book opens, leaving us piecing plot and characters together and puzzling out the techno-speak and science jargon sprinkled throughout the pages.

Watts paints a bleak future world collapsing under the domino wave of the unforeseen consequences of technology. A fascinating book based on hard science and issues.

...I’m not about to give away the plot, but I will say that Watts confirms my 1999 statement that the enemy of humanity is humanity’s own shortsighted stupidity and greed, the sort of thing that turns children into walking disaster zones, treats adults as interchangeable things, insists that unchecked fertility is a Good Thing, and values billions of dollars above billions of lives. The ending may strike you as too pat, but you’ll enjoy getting there.

A sequel of considerable merit. [Maelstrom] becomes something quite different from Starfish, and quite fascinating as well... A unique version of cyberspace rendered beautifully with literary skill and a technological sophistication admirably verging on mystical speculation... an excellent and, on balance, quite literarily-successful science fiction novel.

Tying the two books together has necessitated weighing down virtually the first third of what could have just as well been a free-standing novel with a detailed recapitulation of the events of Starfish.... would have been a good deal better if it had been conceived to stand on its own.