Singularity station

Singularity Station by Brian N Ball. Very thin, bloody dreadful piece of exclamation mark ridden tosh from an author now so negligible that no one has even bothered to make a Wikipedia page for him. He's most famous, I would guess, for novelising a few episodes of Space 1999.

Singularity Station is a novel in the Vogtian tradition, employs galactic-wide coincidences beyond any kind of credibly, probably, uses 'coruscation'/'coruscating' more often than in any SF novel not written by E E 'Doc' Smith, and has a villain who talks about himself in the third person. Unfortunately none of it is very inventive, interesting, or badly-written enough to generate any guilty pleasure. It's just dull. Especially those moments where Ball pads his thin show more story by repeating action from different viewpoints without adding anything other than filling the page with more internal monologue full of rhetorical questions. (From which we gather, in great detail, that whatever the hell is going on at any particular point is a mystery to everyone involved - including, I suspect, the author.)

On the upside; it is mercifully short. show less

The Jansky Singularity has been gobbling up spacecrafts for centuries. It is essentially some super massive black hole that has random quakes which grab whatever spacecraft are around it. One of these is a super passenger liner, and 800 people are sucked into this thing. The captain of this ship loses control and is the only survivor. He decides he needs to face his demons and returns to the singularity, where things can either be resolved, or remain a mystery.

This book reads like a typical DAW book. If you like that style then read it. Its short enough to not take up a lot of your time. I personally like the DAW books in a quaint sort of way. The reading is not super hard, and the stories are a lot like TV shows. The book also shows show more paranoia of computers and AI that was somewhat popular during its publication. Man fights man, man fights robots, man fights nature, all present in this book. Character development is dealt with in a half hazard way, meaning its really not. The book is another story driven. Its good to read these sort of books to see where the science fiction genre began, but I wouldn’t recommend it for most people, more of a niche book.

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