@RUTGERS.ARPA:DA61@CMU-CS-A.ARPA (03/08/85)
From: Dave Ackley <David.Ackley@CMU-CS-A.ARPA> A couple of recent messages have described Brunner's latest novel, The Crucible of Time, as unfinishable. I did finish it. It is a book easier to appreciate than to love. Brunner set himself a difficult task for the book: No humans ever appear. No humanoid aliens, no genetically altered human stock, no first-contact with space-faring humans, nothing. It is certainly possible to fulfill this constraint in a more-or-less trivial way, by taking any story one likes and replacing "Earth" with "Grotz", "marriage" with "conflockage", and so on. Brunner wanted more \alien/ aliens than that. But if there are no human-like characters, the aliens can't be \too/ alien. Imagine Lem's Solaris without a human presence. If the alien mind is unfathomable, and there are no humans, there is no story. Parts of The Crucible of Time were slow, but I quite appreciated the line that Brunner walked between syntactically alien humans and semantically incomprehensible aliens. Borrow the book and give it a try. -Dave Ackley (Ackley@CMU-CS-A)