Reviewed by Steven H Silver
The future, according to veteran SF author Frederik Pohl is extremely bleak. He demonstrates this from the first page of his novel, The Siege of Eternity by including interruptions to the main plot which point out the violence and fear which pervades American culture. Into this society comes an message from an alien race. Pohl deals with the immediate aftermath of this contact in the first book of the series, The Other End of Time.
Opening with the arrest of Dan Dannerman, the hero from the first book, Pohl sets the reader up for a fairly typical space opera which, in many ways, calls back to an earlier time in the history of science fiction. Pohl initially does a good job of filling in the backstory without being to obviously repetitive from the first novel.
Unfortunately, the first third of the novel continues to tell the reader what has happened without showing them anything. There is very little action as Dannerman and his cousin, Pat Adcock are questioned by the National Bureau of Investigation and later do their own questioning of others. Instead of writing about the action, Pohl is describing events which have all occured off-stage.
Another one of the big problems with the novel is Pohl's use of parenthetical asides to fill in the details of his world. Instead of using these blurbs to break up chapters or sub-chapters, they are inserted, almost stream-of-conciously between paragraphs, often giving a disjointed feel the the flow of the novel.
While an argument could be made that The Siege of Eternity is a novel of ideas, or at least a novel of idea, Pohl does not introduce any of his philosophy into the novel until relatively near the end. A cerebral novel should begin giving the reader something to think about within the first ten pages. The Siege of Eternity doesn't even work as a first contact novel since the powers that be are not particularly interested in the aliens who eventually appear on Earth.
This year (1997) marks the sixtieth anniversary of Frederik Pohl's first sale ("Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", Amazing Stories, 10/37, as by Elton Andrews). Over the years, he has written an incredible amount of science fiction, much of it fantastic. The Siege of Eternity does not belong among Pohl's best work. Readers, particularly those not particularly familiar with Pohl's writing, would be better served by picking up a copy of Gateway, Man Plus or his more recent Mining the Oort.
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