Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Barcelona Ultramar 1990
Description
A young Russian boy, accompanied by his devoted minder, turns up in Japan and presents a problem to the American security officials who take on his case. For the boy appears to be part of a sophisticated Soviet experiment and to have the mind of a dead astronaut imperfectly imprinted on his own. If the boy is to be believed, then the experiment has been extended to a whale... And in Mexico, ground-breaking research by Nobel Prize winner Paul Hammond and his disparate team has shown that what we perceive as the Universe is no more than the ghost of the real thing. Signals received by his radio telescope show that the Universe God created no longer exists. Then the whales start singing their death-yantra throughout the oceans of the world.
User reviews
LibraryThing member ropie
This is a fascinating novel in many ways and deals with some large ideas but on a relatively small scale, which was refreshing. Too many times I have found myself overwhelmed by the scale of a hard-sf novel crumbling around my ears as the story suffers. Not so here as the chapters are short and the
Unfortunately, the general prose is extremely 'hard-sf'-esque: there is never a moment when any of the characters talk or think about anything other than the topic at hand (except for the occasional bit of chauvinistic voyeurism or copulation). The characters themselves are nothing more than ideas attached to names either.
Despite this, and the succinct nature of The Jonah Kit, the threads of discovery that the author draws out of the story, although a little dated in places, are quite powerful. The ending in particular is a real triumph and one of the best that I have come across in SF recently.
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general progress of the book is interspersed with passages of Whale-speak, which are puzzling at first but seem to work quite well. Unfortunately, the general prose is extremely 'hard-sf'-esque: there is never a moment when any of the characters talk or think about anything other than the topic at hand (except for the occasional bit of chauvinistic voyeurism or copulation). The characters themselves are nothing more than ideas attached to names either.
Despite this, and the succinct nature of The Jonah Kit, the threads of discovery that the author draws out of the story, although a little dated in places, are quite powerful. The ending in particular is a real triumph and one of the best that I have come across in SF recently.
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LibraryThing member electrascaife
I can't really give a summary of this one, because I never could figure out what the heckin' heck was going on. There was a whale with, I think?, a man's mind in it, and a runaway boy, and some deeply unlikable other characters doing other stuff that I couldn't manage to care about in the
So this one was a big NOPE for me.
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slightest. So this one was a big NOPE for me.
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Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1975
Physical description
207 p.; 18 cm