Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Maelstrom

Top positive review

Intelligently crafted stories

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2019

Being an avid sci-fi reader I've come to associate hard sci-fi with bad character development, as opposed to 'soft' sci-fi with good character development. Not so for Peter Cawdron. He (seemingly) effortlessly builds and develops very real characters, blending them with a solid dose of scientific facts and spins it all in compelling plots that tend to challenge the common assumption about a given subject in a very refreshing style.

Reading anything from Peter Cawdron is almost a guarantee, for a very solid, enjoyable read. Cawdron is like the Freddie Mercury of writing, his repertoire is broad and he appears equally at home, whether the subject being space, aliens, zombies, crime, love or humor.

It's clear from reading Cawdron's work, that he genuinely loves science. He seems to suck up new concepts and ideas like a Dyson, and isn't afraid to venture into quite a bit of research to come up with plausible and enjoyable new takes on almost any subject. On top of that the majority of his plots reveals a very reflected approach to all things about being human in different society structures, as well as to the risks/rewards of several technological and behavioral trends we face both as individuals and as a (human) race.

One notable feature of Cawdron's artfully crafted books, is, that there's no common denominator in plot development, or at least none I recognize. Some authors seems to build their plots from a template, that after three or four books, makes you sigh 'here we go again, boriiiing...', right before terminating your reader relationship. The unpredictable plot structure of Cawdron's worth, even after having read about fifteen of his books, deserves high praise.

Cawdron has easily joined the exclusive club of my all time favorite authors, being in good company with people such as Alastair Reynolds, Ramez Naam, Iain Banks, Cixin Liu, Richard Morgan, JRR Tolkien, Neal Stephenson, Ann Leckie, and several others.

14 people found this helpful

Top critical review

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LBlack

Meh….

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2021

This would be better as a cheesy Syfy network movie. I kept hoping it would get better, but it didn’t. I literally made myself finish the book, which isn’t usually a problem for me, but this was a dud.

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From the United States

Brian

An Interesting Take on Alternate Realities

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2018

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Maelstrom is a collection of three short stories that all weave into one larger story.

The first story – Collide was, as with all Cawdron books, well thought out and shocking when it comes to the finale. It was short (definitely the lead in/hook you early) story. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with the first few chapters but not too long after I thought that Cawdron had me hooked.

In Collide we learn a little about the set up of the entire book, what’s causing the change, and what could possibly come from the issue that’s created (notice my vagueness – I know if I get much deeper it’ll give it all away).

The second book – Impact is where the real meat and potatoes live. We find out that things aren’t what they seem. Animals from others times and places are now all of a sudden in the middle of the city and attacking people. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this one but I was already hooked. I had a hard time getting into the “this animal is here” belief – though after a while (and meeting the old man) I started to really come to. The introduction of the paramedic and police officer (and their continued proximity) was well thought out and written.

The final story – Maelstrom – is where we start to find out what is going on, how they think they’re going to fix it, and if they actually do. This was fascinating. There were parts of this that I couldn’t wrap my head around (time travel/alternate reality books get confusing if there is more than one version of a person or reality existing at the same time). But it was enjoyable none-the-less.

Overall, I thought that Maelstrom was an interesting look at different paradoxes and realities. I enjoyed the way it was written and the character development. I found myself scratching my head at a few parts but I think Cawdron did some of that on purpose.

Slight spoiler: there was a scene late in the book where someone keeps seeing different versions of themselves – all I could think of was the “Hello John” scene from Jurassic Park when they cloned him and made numerous versions for the intro video about Dino DNA.

12 people found this helpful

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A wonderfully wacky venture into parallel worlds

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2022

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The Bermuda Triangle. Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. The Mary Celeste. Legends like these never seem to die. But is there a common thread that links them other than what how unlikely they seem? You’ll never find a more colorful answer than in Maelstrom, the eleventh novel in Peter Cawdron’s long-running series of standalone tales of First Contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. A skein of three closely-linked stories, Maelstrom skillfully explores the fanciful notion that other worlds collide with Earth.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH A NEANDERTHAL
In “Collision,” the first of the three stories, the protagonist is Dr. Elizabeth Callie, an American surgeon working in a poor rural Chinese clinic. There, she encounters an impossible patient—a Neanderthal. And when she attempts to accompany him back to his people in the desert, they stumble into a top-secret Chinese military facility. There, the story takes an even stranger turn.

RAMPAGING DINOSAURS IN CENTRAL PARK
Book Two of Maelstrom is entitled “Impact.” And it seems to bear no connection to Dr. Callie and Ax, the name she’s given the Neanderthal. The scene has shifted to Central Park in New York City. There, our attention moves to a young police officer named Mark Janos and Victoria Selena Mendes, a medic. The two find themselves caught up in a massive explosion that has obliterated a huge portion of the park and the adjoining Harlem neighborhood. But what’s even stranger is that the pair encounter a family of wandering sauropods and a theropod resembling Tyrannosaurus Rex. But even this astonishing development isn’t the oddest thing to occur.

ADVENTURING INTO A NEW WORLD
The two stories come together in Book Three, the novel’s title story. Mark Janos, Vicky Mendes, Dr. Callie, and Ax meet in the desert of Xinjiang. Together with two scientists Dr. Callie has met deep inside a mountain within the military facility, they journey through a singularity of sorts in an effort to stop the collision of worlds that has caused so much havoc on Earth. We know they will succeed (or else there would be no one to read the story). But the adventures they undertake in their quest to save the planet are suspenseful to the end.

THE AUTHOR COMMENTS
“Parallel worlds have been a mainstay of science fiction for decades, and I was initially skeptical I could bring anything new to the sub-genre,” Cawdron writes. He goes on to note, “When it comes to worlds colliding, we are well into the realm of science fiction. There are some speculative ideas in the scientific community that the cosmic background radiation may contain evidence of colliding universes as the Big Bang unfolded, but there’s no definitive proof, and no reason to think such an event could occur again in the tiny region of space that makes up the Earth, but it’s a fun, interesting storyline.” Yes, indeed. That it is.

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Fred

Check your facts...

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2020

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Over the last few years there have been discoveriea showing that neanderthals were capable of cave art like the paintings in northern spaon showed, we already knew they could speak because their tools show a need for avstract thinking and thua the transmission of sich knowledge which is impossible through observation only, there is more but i advise you to search neanderthal on researchgate f.i.
Still i enjoyed the book, nearly fonished now but the "grunts' got to me...(and yes I'm an archaeologist ;))

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Gert-Jan Lind

Great fun

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2022

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Three short story’s with believable and likable characters that form one bigger story. You switch from one viewpoint to an other as the story unfolds. Clever believable sci-fi.

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debra

Very interesting tales

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2017

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A great collection of suppositions that mesh very well together. Worlds are colliding from parallel universes and killing billions.What exactly is going is slowly understood as a varied and amazing team grows from varying times and worlds to "travel" to the past on yet another world colliding with our own. Neanderthals, dinosaurs, UFOs with aliens and. a human team all thrown together bye to stop the entire universe( and all parallels included) from dying. Great read !

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Elson Alves

Easy summer read

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2021

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Interesting ideas but not hard sci-fi.
Enjoyable read, fast paced, uncomplicated but suspenseful enough to keep you reading into late hours.

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Pierrette

Engrossing

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2020

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While I prefer space exploration to time travel (space-time travel?) this was very entertaining. The description of Neanderthals was so much more realistic to me than the usual dumb hominid one.

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