Cyclops - Clive Cussler (Audiobook)

Audiobook Reader:  Michael Pritchard

Books on Tape, 1993

Originally copyrighted 1986

Listened to October 2013, at age 35

This is the eighth book in the “Dirk Pitt” series of novels. There are some odd continuity issues, but it does depend greatly upon prior books in the series, especially Deep Six and Night Probe!  Not a good place to start.

Publisher’s summary via Books On Tape:

A wealthy American financier disappears aboard an antique blimp while hunting for a ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle in 1918. The blimp drifts toward Florida with a crew of dead men -- Soviet cosmonauts.

Meanwhile, Dirk Pitt discovers that a group of U.S. industrialists has put a colony on the moon, a secret base they will defend at any cost.


Threatened in space, the Russians plan a savage retaliation -- and only Dirk Pitt can stop them. From a Cuban torture chamber to the cold ocean depths, Pitt races to defuse an international conspiracy that threatens to shatter world stability!

Wow.  There are some serious spoilers in the promo blurb – answers to mysteries that take quite a while to solve in the story.  It also missed out on two main storylines – Russia’s attempt to take over Cuba, and a treasure hunt.

Reactions after the break.  I don't think I spoil anything any worse than the back cover blurb.

Overall:

This was not a good book.  Many of the problems that I’ve had with prior books are missing, but a whole new slew of replacements showed up.  We’ll start with the good: 

The Good:

·       The audiobook reader was pretty reasonable.  Not fantastic, but not actively bad, either.

·       The female lead was a strong character in her own right.  It’s about the first time for that.  There were some vestiges of male patronization and stereotypical “damsel in distress” helplessness, but she had skills and toughness.

·       There was plenty of action (an assault on a moon-base, and an assault on a Cuban island, and sneaking through Cuba, etc., etc.) and some pretty neat world-building and setting ideas and plot points.

The less-good:

·       Characters.  With a few exceptions (Pitt, Jessie LeBaron, a few others), they were stuffed shirts.  This was especially noticeable in the high political circles where a LOT of the book played out.

·       Continuity was played very fast and loose.  One of the more egregious examples was that despite the previous book (where the U.S. President was brain wiped and deposed) having happened only a couple of months prior, the events had been mostly forgotten by everyone, and the current regime seemed to have been ongoing for a long time.  Another was that our friend Congresswoman Smith was Miss-not-appearing-in-this-story, despite her and Pitt never having broken up.  She was not mentioned even once.

The actively bad:

·       The exposition.  It was horrible.  One “as you know, Bill” conversation after another.  I’m really starting to dislike the phrase “It stands to reason” being used in high-level planning sessions.  There were also many “let’s catch you up” briefings.  It was just clumsy.

·       The dialogue.  Unless Pitt was talking, it was painful.  This ties into the exposition problems, since boardroom meetings were often the locations of this exposition.  But it was just bad throughout.

·       The pacing.  Typically, when there are lots of individual plot lines, a satisfying ending happens when the threads start to come together, and they are solved at a similar time.  In this case, all the storylines were introduced early, and then they pretty much were solved like beads on a string, with catch-up exposition in between.  It was hard to sustain interest through all the lulls.  It also didn’t help that cliff-hangers of the “oh my goodness is he actually dead this time” (when obviously he’s not – there are many more books in the series) happened several times through the story.  By the time we were starting to wrap up the treasure and Cuban takeover storylines, I was just waiting for the book to end.

·       The competence (by which I mean the lack thereof) of anyone except our heroes.  There was just so much stupidity and inability.

I found it really hard to buy into the power politics and scheming of the Russian, Cuban, and American leaders as-written, so whenever we got into the high-level stuff, the story fell apart for me.  Then we’d get into the close-in sections (Pitt, Ira Hagin (sp? – it’s tough when you just hear it)) and things would smooth out.  But all-in, it just wasn’t very good.

Rating: 2

At this point, looking at the first 8 books, I’d probably not bother with reading any except Pacific Vortex and Vixen 03.  The rest have either been infuriating or weak.  We’ll see where the series goes from here.  I still haven’t hit the stories that I remember being really fun – Sahara and the like.

Other Opinions:

Audiobook Heaven

Not a strong review.  But it talks about the audiobook, so that’s something.

 M. E. Kinkade

Disliked it even more that I did.

There were also a few bland “It was Dirk Pitt! Yay!” reviews, and that’s about it.