Recounting history, in the forward to Rama II, Arthur
C. Clarke says that he had always felt that he could never let another
writer tamper with his unique brand of creativity; thus he would never
collaborate with anyone to pen a work of fiction. But in 1986, three years
before the aforementioned book was published, he agreed to work with Gentry Lee,
an engineer at JPL, on a novel that came
to be titled Cradle. Perhaps he should have stuck to his convictions. I have thoroughly enjoyed Clarke’s solo works, especially Rendezvous
with Rama, so I thought I would give Cradle a shot. The story seemed
interesting enough, and you know the old saying: "two minds are better than
one." I would soon be disappointed, however, as I began sinking in the
quicksand that is Gentry Lee. Now, I’m all for character development and, if it’s pertinent to future
events, I don’t really mind if it drags a little. But the first few hundred
pages of Cradle are filled with more-or-less pointless character
development, clearly written by Lee, that would be perfectly at home in a
Harlequin romance novel. A few pages of sci-fi, clearly not written by
Lee, are interspersed so that the reader may be reminded that they paid $6 for a
Clarke novel and not $2 for a grocery store romance tome. To be fair, I will admit that the general character interaction and
background does come into play later on, though it accounts for a very small
portion of what you waded through. But it just drags on and on and is littered
with unnecessary sex scenes that, if you read much of Gentry Lee’s work, you
will find is one of his obsessions. I fail to understand why Lee feels that he
must include sex scenes in the middle of a science fiction novel that have
nothing to do with the story. Once would be OK, but after about the fourth time
I found myself dropping the book and thinking "again?!" In addition,
Lee’s obsession with race, with each character being introduced as black,
white, Arab, Mexican, etc. is very annoying. The way that the race is then
portrayed in the most cliché way is increasingly so. Lee may be an able and
accomplished scientist, but his writing in this first effort does not belong on
the same pages with that of Arthur C. Clarke. It is a rare book that I so strongly dislike that I just stop reading it, so
I decided to stick with this one and see the story through to the end. Around
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