Containment [Christian Cantrell, William Dufris] on *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. As Earth’s ability to support human life begins to diminish. Containment (Containment, book 1) by Christian Cantrell – book cover, description, publication history. Cantrell’s debut takes a technically detailed, hard-SF look at possible planetary colonization of Venus. Arik is part of Generation V (for Venus).
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Christian CantrellcolonizationContainmentEarthhard sci-fipost-cyberpunkVenus. When I picked it up, Containment seemed like an interesting choice. It picks an interesting location to set its story: The planet is just considered too unforgiving to set up shop. Naturally, I wanted to see how containmfnt topic was handled. As it turns out, the reality falls a little short, and the result is a highly flawed book with occasional flashes of brilliance.
Some parts are really good, while others just drag on and on. In the end, Containment had many of the makings of being a modern hard sf classic, but unfortunately was unable to put them together in a satisfying way.
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The story follows Arik Ockley, one of the first humans born on Venus. His home, V1, is a self-contained dome on the Venusian surface similar to that clntainment the Biosphere project. Arik is a brilliant computer scientist, one of the few people to ever master controlling a computer solely by brain activity. His skillset is used to work on one of the biggest problems facing V1 — the generation of oxygen. As it turns out, the oxygen supply has been a major issue since the colony began.
When planning for the first generation of humans born in V1, administration makes the inexplicable decision to allow as many people as possible to be born, safety margins be damned. Earth has been on the verge of environmental crisis for several centuries, and while things are looking on the up and up, the administrators are still treating planning as if Earth could collapse at any moment.
His secret research takes him chrsitian the sheltered dome of V1, where he is nearly killed in a serious accident. That christuan has left him with little memory relating to his prior research. However, the behavior of some of his associates post-accident makes him suspicious of what is really going on. To make things a little more rough on Arik, his wife Cadie is now three months pregnant. The clock begins ticking on whether he can piece together the circumstances surrounding his accident, or solve the seemingly insurmountable problem of artificial photosynthesis.
The biggest structural problem with the story lies in its lack of focus.
The book begins with a nifty moral quandary, ala The Cold Equations. That story poses contain,ent interesting problem — a stowaway on an express freight spaceship puts it over its weight limit. Because it is over the weight limit, the freighter does not have enough fuel to slow it down before it lands.
The freighter is carrying vaccines to a colony facing an epidemic. The stowaway, or a few vials of vaccine that may prove critical to the survival of the colony? Containment poses a similar problem.
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The clues that he left for himself prior to his accident lead cangrell to believe that his work would give the colony astounding long-term success. However, the survival of his own daughter depends on him finishing his research on artificial photosynthesis. Should he successfully solve the problem, he might be erased from the colony. Should Arik opt for the long-term success of the colony, or act for the short-term success of his offspring?
The question that the situation raises is interesting, but frustratingly, is one that Containment goes out of its way to avoid answering. He ventures out, and learns that V1 is actually located in Antarctica. The Earth is in worse shape than the administrators have lead him to believe. The toll of 5 centuries of modern society has irreversibly degraded the Earth.
Within its walls are the only clean air and water for hundreds of miles. I felt that the author actually handled the plot twist itself quite well. The story builds up to the reveal kind of slowly, and leaves cnotainment little hints of what the twist actually congainment. Once it happens, a lot of the little quirks that were present in the early stages of the story fall into place.
However, the twist was very dangerously close to being pulled too late. Arik had reached his peak character development, and most of the containmennt things cntrell we learn about V1 are kind of irrelevant.
Containment (Christian Cantrell)
I think the worst thing about the plot twist is that way too much time was spent infodumping the false history of V1. Sitting down and looking at it, the proposition keeps getting more and more absurd. Another problem with this history is that even the contajnment recognized it was too much — it was split into three chapters to serve as a break.
When you get to that point that even you recognize that something is too much, you really need to break out the editorial scissors. Some of the material in that contaibment is kind of silly, too.
For example, it spends a paragraph describing how the problem of consumer waste was solved: Another big issue with the book is its really poor characterization. Arik is extremely well-developed as a character. Everyone else in the story felt like a plot device.
Other characters are even worse — we get names, indications of an underlying motivation, but they end up being so one dimensional that I realized that this was one congainment the biggest missed opportunities of the book. Had some of the main players been developed to the extent of Arik, the story would have been much, much better, even with all of contaainment flaws that I pointed out.
The lack of characterization really comes back to bite the story in the ass at the end. But even here the story fails to follow through. All of these flaws make the story a mess.
With some better editorial direction it could have been one of the top sf novels of One thing that Mr. Cantrell does well is describing systems engineering.
There is also some philosophy of technology tucked into the story in a very non-infodumpy way.
Containment (Children of Occam #1) by Christian Cantrell
He shows the signs of being capable of very good writing, given the focus. I think if the focus had been shifted away from writing a pseudo-history of V1 and onto developing the characters a little more, Containment might have been considered a modern hard sf classic. Instead, its flaws weigh it down to little more than mediocre. You are commenting using your WordPress. comtainment
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