This is not a "potboiler", this is a watched pot that never quite boils! I found the science and math background information quite interesting, but there wasn't really a plot to use it for. To say it moved at a snail's pace is insulting the snails. What passes for a plot rambles along, with lots of side tracks and characters that come and go. Nothing really resolves or finishes, it just stops. Interesting scientific ideas wander through, get explained in detail, than have nothing else to do with the story.

What I found most fun was noticing when predictions from 1990 onto 2010+ were right and wrong. Clarke correctly described the Y2K date problem but focused on fixing mainframes, he noted the exchange of large amounts of data, but invented new miniature terabyte physical devices without a hint of the internet. Research before the mission, a necessary step not often mentioned in adventure stories, is still done with encyclopedias. He created an entire industry using computers to modify old films and tv, which we do have, but used it primarily to remove all scenes of smoking that "offend" audiences, rather that to colorize everything because the younger generations won't watch B&W. He predicted the use of fiberoptic cables (but just for phone calls) but missed the breakup of the USSR. Totally missed the digital effects revolution - mission planning was done with model animation effects. ( )

I read a lot of Clarke's science fiction when I was young and I know I thought it was pretty good. This book came out in 1990 but I had mostly passed on to reading other genres or literary fiction by then (when I did have time to read which wasn't that much). Recently I've been getting back into reading science fiction mostly by authors who weren't writing when I was young. Occasionally I dip into some of the older science fiction but I find it doesn't grab me like the more recent stuff does. This book is a case in point.

The title refers to the Titanic. The book is set in 2012 which was the centenary of the sinking of the ship. Two different groups want to raise the Titanic and since the wreck is in two parts each one has a go. One group plans to raise it with tiny glass spheres filled with gas which will be piped down to the wreck, "packaged in bundles, each a cubic meter in volume. That will give a buoyancy of one ton per unit..."( p. 116). The group behind this has long been involved in glass manufacturing. The other group, from Japan, plans to bring up the stern inside an iceberg which is a bit of poetic justice. They plan to use a couple of decommissioned nuclear subs to provide power to an underwater icemaking machine that will encase the stern. When that is completed the cables restraining it will be severed and it will go up to the surface. To my mind both of these methods seem implausible but I suppose the physics of them is correct. This part of the story was pretty interesting. After all, who isn't interested in the Titanic? Unfortunately Clarke tacked on a subplot about mathematics, specifically the Mandelbrot Set which is pretty technical and very marginally attached to the Titanic story. (A couple helping the Japanese have a daughter who is fascinated by the M-set, the subset of the Mandelbrot Set between 1 and -1). This seems so extraneous that I can only presume that Clarke was so fascinated by this that he had to work it in some way.

So, if you can manage to skim the descriptions of the Mandelbrot mathematics you might enjoy the Titanic story. Otherwise, don't bother. ( )

This is the first Clarke book that I've ever not liked. I didn't care for the characters at all. It was more technical (fractals) than typical Clarke books. I know the subject matter of raising the Titanic is dated, but dated books usually don't bother me. I ended up skimming the last 100 pages... Oh well. ( )

As a teenager I was very partial to science fiction, and read Arthur C Clarke’s novels with great eagerness. Being lamentably ignorant of even the most basic scientific principles (both then, perhaps more excusably, and now, utter shamefully), I particularly relished Clarke’s facility for rendering potentially perplexing ideas in a readily accessible manner. I also liked that fact that his books tended to focus on plausible plots and empathetic characters. While they were generally set in a technologically advance future, the science was generally in the background, and taken as read, rather than laboured over in a level of detail that would have left me cold. I also enjoyed the fact that while he would sometime write stories set against a context of space exploration, with interaction with other galaxies, he seemed equally comfortable writing stories set on earth, and often dealing with the more mundane aspects of life.

As might perhaps be inferred from the novel’s title (which Clarke also gave to one of the chapters in his earlier novel Imperial Earth, which dealt with the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of American Independence), it revolves around the Titanic, the world’s largest, and supposedly unsinkable, sea liner which sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 following a collision with an iceberg. Published in 1990 but set in the early years of the twenty-first century, it focuses on two rival bids to salvage parts of the liner, using two completely different approaches. Working to tight deadlines, and facing stretching political, climatic and environmental challenges, the two teams set about their respective projects. Clarke uses this context to weave in a vivid yet wholly accessible explanation of the works of Mandelbrot, a history of submarine exploration and some fairly comprehensive lessons on chemistry, yet he never once seems to preach or lose the reader's interest.

This is Arthur C Clarke at his awesome best. ( )

Of the Big Three sf writers of the last century, I read more Heinlein than I did Clarke or Asimov. The last I always thought a piss-poor writer, and for some reason Clarke never clicked with me. You’d have thought he would, given he tackles the sort of subjects I enjoy in my sf, and he was very much the hardest, in sf terms, of the three. So you’d also think The Ghost from the Grand Banks, which is about something that has interested me for the past few years, would go down well. It didn’t. The title refers to the wreck of the Titanic, and the novel is basically a rewrite of Cliver Cussler’s Raise the Titanic!, without the implausible thriller-type histrionics, or exclamation mark, and with a series of lectures on, er, Mandelbrot Sets instead. Clarke even has a dig at the film adaptation of Cussler’s novel. The centenary of the sinking of the Titanic is rapidly approaching, and two groups of people decide to raise the wreck to mark it. Since the wreck is in two parts, they’ll each raise one part using different methods. A British consortium plans to use glass spheres to float the forward part of the wreck, and a Japanese-American group will freeze the stern part in an iceberg, which they will then shoot to the surface using rockets. This is a book that revels in its use of future technology, and yet manages to get most of it wrong. It’s an occupational hazard of near-future sf, I admit, but most such novels are written such that they’re readable years later. Clarke didn’t appear to care. And perhaps with good reason: he’d sell boatloads, and if the book was out of print 12 months later, he had plenty of other properties pulling in the cash. It’s not that Clarke stinted on his research, more that it all feels re-used – as if he’d done it for another project and decided to get extra mileage out of it by writing this novel. Which is pretty bad. The characterisation is paper-thin, the plot is obvious, the science is mostly incidental, and the computer technology described is completely off-base… Not one of Clarke”s best. Missable. ( )