When I was about five or six years old, I saw this movie and it gave me terrible nightmares. I only remembered bits and pieces of the story, mostly just the scenes and images that had left an impression. So when I saw this novelization at the used bookstore, I decided to pick it up and give it a try.
It starts out like a classic golden age sci-fi story. You have your crew of stock characters on a typical space exploration mission: the square-jawed no-nonsense captain, the young hotshot pilot, the dispassionate, objective science officer, the emotional and empathetic female crewmate who looks and acts like she walked out of a 60s sitcom, and the gruff, contrarian journalist. There’s also a robot, who acts like a slightly more snarky version of Spock. Towards the beginning, they discover a titannic spaceship that was sent out decades ago to perform the same exploration mission, but never came back. The ship is now run completely by robots, with your stereotypical organ-playing mad scientist the only surviving human.
Aside from all of the overdone cliches, the first half of the story was pretty good. We got hints that something was wrong as the mad scientist invited the crew on as his guests and gave them a lavish, No Mr. Bond, I Want You To Dine style meal. The scenes and images from my 5-year old nightmares all started coming together into a story. The mad scientist claimed that he’d released the rest of the crew to return to Earth, but had continued on the mission because of his love of pure science. All of the wonders of the ship were things that he had singlehandedly invented or ordained, including one very large and very intimidating robot named Maximillian, who served as his second in command.
I just realized that my summary of this story reads like an away mission from the indie game The Orion Trail. Such a hilarious game. If you enjoy classic sci-fi tropes and cliches, this book is dripping with them—except that they’re all played completely straight, unlike The Orion Trail. So yeah.
The rest of this review is going to contain spoilers, so if you want to read this book, consider yourself warned.
The action picks up in the second half, as the crew learns the truth about the mad scientist, argue about what they should do, and ultimately have to fight their way out because the mad scientist has decided to plunge his ship into the black hole—for science! There’s a harrowing escape, with a small but not unpredictable plot twist as the journalist turns coward, tries to run off with their ship alone, and promptly gets it destroyed. The rest of the crew has to run across the main ship in a mad bid to escape, with explosions and hull breaches everywhere. Lots of skin-of-your-teeth moments, but there’s never really any doubt that they’ll make it.
Except… they don’t. They get to the only remaining shuttle, undock with the disintegrating wreckage of the titannic science ship—and promptly find that the shuttle is already preprogrammed to go into the black hole. This was probably what gave me nightmares as a kid: the fact that the film writers decided to subvert an otherwise totally cliche sci-fi adventure by having everyone die at the end, instead of escaping alive. But that’s the only trope that gets subverted—everything else is played so totally straight that it almost parodies itself.
Still, it was an entertaining story, and up until this point I was willing to give it at least three stars. The suspense building up to the final voyage into the black hole, and what our heroes (and villains) would find there, was actually quite well done—which is probably why I developed such a fascination with black holes and astronomy as a kid. But the last page ends with the surviving characters finding that their disembodied consciousnesses can now span the entire universe, so they aren’t really dead, just immortalized in some weird spiritual way because they went through the black hole and came out the other side. It was very weird, and not in a good way. Frankly, it felt like a total cop-out, and that’s why I’m giving this book two stars.
So yeah. It was a fun trip down memory lane for me, but it’s not worth reading twice, except perhaps for the nostalgia. The movie was probably better.