Immortality Option

I just finished this book in a late nite read-a-thon! Towards the end, like seemingly all of Hogan's work that I've read, I got drawn into the story despite the sometimes clunky and cliched writing. Hogan is above all an "idea man"-- with very engaging concepts and ideas (it probably don't hurt that I'm fascinated with robots and AIs and all that), but the ideas suffer a bit from his writing style and often flat characterization. If you've read Hogan before, you know what I mean.Even still, it seems very unfair to me to bludgeon this book as UNIQUELY bad for James P. Hogan, as though he suddenly went downhill. I would actually say that this book is better than _The Code of Lifemaker_. It seems to me that Hogan had some time to think about the backstory of his characters more and invent even more intriguing ideas in the time between the two novels. Yes, as one reviewer noted, there is a VERY silly passage about some kind of seamless media conspiracy to spin the news, but that one paragraph only detracts so much from the whole book. Look, in the first book, there was a cigarette vending machine(!) aboard one of the NASO spaceships(!!!!). One must allow for Hogan's little quirks.The biggest "con" about this book, in my humble opinion, is the same con for _The Code of Lifemaker_: The tedious psuedo-medieval gibberish spoken by the Taloids, the naturally evolved race of bipedal machines. After so many thees and thous and other sophomoric attempts at the King's English of antiquity, you really long for the action to shift to the humans or the Borjians or anywhere else...!!! Also, the females in Hogan's books (the few that exist) are either conniving witches, total airheads, feminazis, or baby-making machines... quite literally on the last one! But so many authors (both male and female) are guilty of this, it hardly seems fair to single out Hogan.The pros include: the return of Karl Zambendorf, who has grown personally as in the last book, but who is more than capable of all his old tricks; some hilarious moments with the Borjians, the bird-like aliens whose advanced culture produced the Searcher ships that spawned the Taloids; and above all, GENIUS 5, an AI who is hilarious and winsome and one of Hogan's most fully rendered characters. Despite Hogan's oft-noted clunky writing style, and some very predictable scenes, _The Immortality Option_ contained some genuinely exciting plot twists and developments. Often, just when you think that Hogan has lazily written his characters out of a conundrum, realistic disaster strikes and plans go awry. And without giving too much away, it has a happy ending!

In the original, the author blew me away with natural evolution for robots. In this book, he keeps artful, suspenseful control of a plot that spans over a million years, two star systems, three very distinct species, and several outstanding individuals.I made the mistake of reading this book before going to bed..I couldn't put it down to go to sleep! The mood swings, sometimes abruptly, from wonder, to laugh-out-loud funny, to nail-biting tension. All my favorite characters from the original return, and are joined by the imaginatively-rendered Borijans and their AI GENIUS in a three-way battle for the future of Titan, which is also a battle between science and nonsense, gullibility and guile, compassion and selfishness.

Considering the massive set and costume changes between successive "Star Trek" movies, which are generally 2-3 years apart, I wondered how well the author would pick up after over a decade. I must say, it was as if the books had been written one after another. In this sequel to "Code of the Lifemaker" we learn much about the race that created the craft that landed on Titan and started the ball rolling and find out that a hidden agenda made a routine exploration mission somewhat less than routine. By the end, we discover that paranoia and gullibility are not strictly human traits but universal in nature and applicable to aliens and computers alike. While "Code of the Lifemaker" and "The Immortality Option" stand up on their own, together they're a blast.