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In a bid to spread mankind across the Universe The Omega Corporation
has carefully selected 4000 men and women to go into suspended
animation aboard the space vessel Dauntless. The ship's
mission - to find a habitable planet where mankind can begin
again. Also onboard is a four man maintenance crew whose job
it will be, every thousand or so years, to awaken and perform
routine checks. However, when the maintenance crew are awakened
they find that there is a serious problem... and one that
is not going to be fixed easily...
Approaching
Omega holds
nothing back. It's punchy, to the point and never pauses to
lets you get your breath. In places this was a little annoying.
Occasionally I wanted author Eric Brown to slow down and explore
his world a little more. But, for the most part, his breakneck
story telling works incredibly well.
I
also loved the ingenious way Brown gets the reader up to speed
on why this mission is being undertaken. Instead of a lengthy,
and no doubt dull, dialogue sequence, we hear an explanation
about the ships compliment and mission through a TV news report.
This certainly helped to keep the pace going.
I
picked this book up expecting to be delving in and out for
a few days, but once I started reading I found it incredibly
difficult to put down. I know that's a bit of a cliché,
but it's true.
Put
simply, Approaching Omega is a cross between a number
of classic sci-fi movies. There are elements of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Alien and Star Trek's
The Borg. But Brown doesn't just stitch these altogether in
a hope of creating a good read.
Thank
heavens that Brown steered clear of clichés when it
came to the subject of suspended animation. It seems to be
an unwritten law in sci fi that at least one of the cryogenic
pods must malfunction leaving behind a skeleton in one pod
(Planet
of the Apes,
Star Trek: The Next Generation's The Neutral Zone
and Star Trek: Voyager's The Thaw are good examples
of this).
I
really was (another cliché coming up) on the edge of
my seat through the majority of this book. It's fast, fun
and frantic... I challenge you to put this down once you've
picked it up.
Nick
Smithson
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