The Last Theorem

Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl
The Last Theorem Cover

Clarke and Pohl team up for drivel

spectru
4/18/2014
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Got off to a reasonably good start, enough to hold my interest through three quarters of the book, but degenerated by the end. Some of the political fictions very much required suspension of disbelief, e.g.. that the U.S., China, and Russia, would cooperate on the development of a super weapon and then turn it over to the U.N., but, once accepted, that really didn't have a major impact on the quality of the story. The life story of our protagonist, Ranjit, tended to ramble a bit and by the end his life event swings were so wild that the story seemed out of control. The descriptions of the extra-terrestrial beings during the main body of the story were distracting interruptions and just plain silly.

The climax of this book was so disappointing that I almost chose not to finish it and could hardly wait to be done with it.

Here's a minor little annoyance, only relevant to the audiobook version: Colonel Bledsoe, a rough, boorish ex-marine with a southern-ish accent, would never have pronounced Iraq as ear-rock, he would have said eye-rack.