THE QUIET POOLS

by Michael P. Kube-McDowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1990

Medium-future yarn about the launching of an interstellar colony ship that somehow gets tangled up with the prolonged psychoanalysis of a father-son relationship: Kube-McDowell's hard-cover debut. Built by Hiroko Sasaki, boss of Allied Transcom, the starship Memphis will carry 10,000 pioneers to Tau Ceti. But many oppose the starship project as a despoiler of the Earth and a waste of vital resources: the fanatical Home-worlders, led by the mysterious Jeremiah, will go to any lengths to prevent the ship's departure. So, Sasaki directs her security chief, Mikhail Dryke, to track down and stop Jeremiah. And the psychoanalysis angle? Well, immature, troubled project archivist Christopher McCutcheon's tripartite marriage is failing, mostly thanks to unresolved stresses between Christopher and his strange, cold, remote father, William. Amid all this, Kube-McDowell's best idea--that the human urges to seek power, to breed frantically, and to pioneer, are genetically encoded--gets only a confused, deliberately misleading airing . . .until Dryke kills Jeremiah, who turns out to be William McCutcheon! Christopher--shocked, disbelieving, and angry--must ponder the revelation that Jeremiah was his father and apply the genetic-directive theory to decide whose side he's really on. Tediously familiar in the main, with lots of yawn-worthy head-shrinking: some promising ideas wasted through lack of focus.

Pub Date: May 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION