- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publication Year: 2014
- Format: CD
- Disks: 10
- ISBN-10: 1427243832
- ISBN-13: 978-1427243836
- Author: Preston, Douglas
- Read by: Scott Sowers
The Kraken Project by Douglas Preston is one of the worst books I have ever suffered through. I am certainly glad that I got it from the library and the only thing I had to invest was time while I listened in my car. Had this been a paper book, I would never have finished it, but I managed to barely maintain my sanity as I listened to the some of the worst drivel ever put down in print. From the beginning, the story was flawed. The science and technology made no sense. The book regularly contradicted itself. It was filled with ridiculous cliches strung together with the only goal I can see was to take up some more space in the book. It is a bad bad bad book. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME.
A brilliant programmer, Melissa, has found the key to make a stable Artificial Intelligence program that will be used on a probe being sent to the Kraken Sea on Titan (a moon of Saturn). It has to be autonomous and she has found the simple programming secret that will make it work, but does not reveal it to anyone, including her coworkers or employers. (I stuck around until the end to discover this secret. The secret is finally revealed near the end of the book, and it is stupid). On the first test of the software in the actual probe, the AI goes crazy and causes an explosion that kills seven people before it escapes into the internet. Then the race is on for the government agencies, and a psychotic wall street trader and Melissa and the recurring hero of Preston novels, Wyman Ford, to try to track down “Dorothy”. Do they want to enslave her? Will they kill her? Will she kill all of humanity before they can stop her?
There are ridiculous complications and self contradictory bullshit throughout this story. It is almost bad enough to be a parody of this type of book, but it fails even as parody. It is just BAD. A few examples of the contradictions, ridiculousness and cliches: this program which is meant to operate on a probe several hundred million miles from Earth is voice operated. A robot which the author states has no feeling in its fingers, has to feel its way into an injury to extract parts for an escape attempt. The same robot, built to be a child’s toy, suddenly has screwdrivers and other tools built into its fingertips. There’s the evil sheriff who happens to lock up and abuse the heroes for no reason other than to be a mean evil sheriff and to provide a way to slow down the story. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad. The good guys are cartoonishly brilliant and capable in whatever expertise they happen to need at the time, but they are misunderstood in the real world. The FBI is cartoonishly inept. The AI can do anything and has all sorts of emotions but then complains about its lack of feelings and emotions.
This is a bad book. Did I mention this was a bad book. I took one for the team and listened to nearly 12 1/2 hours of this so you don’t have to. The only reason I can think of to read this book is the one thing that I got out of it. I am an author of science fiction stories, and this book reinforced in me how important it is to have the story make sense, to have the story hang together, to have the characters make sense not only to me, but to themselves, and of course not to rely on overused cliches. If you are an author looking for examples of what NOT to do in your writing then maybe you should suffer through this pile of dung. If you are anyone else, run, run, run as fast as you can in the other direction.
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Try Plastivore by Matt Truxaw
I wrote this story. It is internally consistent and built on only slightly exaggerated actual science. There are a few unlikely coincidences, but not so much as to make you cringe. If you like good science based fiction, this one is sooooo much better than the Kraken Project.
