Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't know what has happened to Greig Beck. He started off so well, with great stories, characters, writing and pacing. And then... wham. Dud after dud after dud. With TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (TTCOTE) , he has reached a nadir. It can't possibly get worse than this. TTCOTE is a retelling of Jules Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Same plot, same story line but without any semblance of reality with respect to the science, the characters or the resolution. Even the writing has deteriorated from early Beck novels. In one sentence a character has a half stick of dynamite, in the next it has turned into a quarter of a stick. Plain is misspelled (or missed) as plane, verse is substituted for versus, tense mismatches from sentence to sentence. Wow a complete disaster. Unlike the PRIMORDIA trilogy that was also very closely based on a 100 year old novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (and that was excellent), TTCOTE covers no new ground of any consequence. The characters all act so stupidly that it is a wonder that any of them can tie their shoes. Just like in the original, a group of cavers (rather than explorers) follows a mysterious text describing a previous journey to the center of the earth. This time the text is Russian, and the ancient explorer was Arkaday Saknussov instead of Arne Saknussemm (misspelled by Beck). Saknussov was allegedly the model for Verne's Saknussemm. Anyway, this group (actually two groups) prepares for a descent into the world's deepest cave somwhere in Russia, after meeting the only survivor of a similar attempt in the early 1970s who warns them of horrors beyond belief. So naturally, they set off with no weapons, no compass, no camera, absolutely nothing more than standard caving gear. And a minimal amount of that. Beck invents something called "gravity wells" that make no sense at all. The group leader (apparently the only one out of all these geniuses that has even heard of Jules Verne's classic) explains that Earth's "...gravity is a function of its mass, core and it's rotation." Uh, no it's not. It's only mass that counts. But who's counting? Anyway, these gravity wells are super long channels in which objects float. OK. But then when our intrepid and unprepared explorers dive into one, something (never explained) makes them accelerate *downwards* to 250 mph. At journey's end, the survivors find another gravity well where objects float but this time when they enter the well, the accelerate *upwards* at 250 mph. It not only the science that's stupid, so are the explorers. Early on one of them finds a funky looking pool of algae infested water and decides to drink it, even after warnings from his smarter pals. So of course he ends up exploding from the giant fungal colony growing inside him. The rest leave him to grow there without a second of emotion. And he's only mentioned once more in the novel. Later, another of the bright boys sees a strange fruit and decides to eat it, apparently no knowing that such things as poisonous plants exist. It turns out to burn the hell out of his mouth, costing him two molars in the process. In sum, Beck manages the trifecta of a ripped off plot, nonsensical science and stupid characters with some poor writing for dessert. You've been warned. Stay Away. Strongly not recommended. JM Tepper