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Author (or Editor): Walt Becker |
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Title: Link |
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Fiction? F |
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Publisher: William
Morrow, |
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Date: 1998; 2000 |
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ISBN: ISBN |
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Series Name: |
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Physical description: paper 416 pgs |
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Relevance to doaskdotell |
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Review: Book Review of
Walt Becker’s Link Link, by Walt
Becker, published William Morrow, Also Clive Cussler’s Atlantis Found. You don’t find a lot of novels
with bibliographies, but this one’s is extensive. Becker, better known as a
film and television director and screenwriter, has spun an elaborate
“pseudo-science-fiction” tale in the manner of Michael Chricton
(especially as in Sphere). The
locations are exotic: But what is most interesting is
Becker’s science. He definitely has a
message, that he wants us to take seriously the idea that something more than
evolution and chance accounts for the Dawn of Man (in 2001-speak). So it could have been a divine
insemination. Really, he summarizes
his views with a brief but effective postscript, in which he mentions a few
examples like the Peri Reis maps and the Great Year
based on the Earth’s precession. Throughout the book, he presents the
accounts of the Great White Ones, tall, blond, hairy men who supposedly
visited many parts of the world during pre-history, as well as the Dogon, who carried a legend apparently about Sirius (as
previously recounted in Robert K. G. B. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery
(1976)). Indeed the anecdotes, the curious
parallels among different civilizations and their astounding astronomical
knowledge, bear serious examination. There have been many studies of these,
as well as counter-studies showing how the Egyptians must have built the
Pyramids by hand, or how the Chaco culture assembled and then tore down
itself systematically over five decades, never mind the Maya, and all the
curious legends about Atlantis and the Basques. Indeed, it may be no less astounding that a
culture could dedicate its populace to building the Pyramids, the Nacza Lines, or to the Becker also proposes an
interesting idea: that over time, things deteriorate unless some overriding
consciousness intervenes, possibly an anti-evolution (as well as religious)
idea. Indeed, there are recent reports that man may have arisen
simultaneously at different points around the world. All of this deserves very
systematic cataloguing in a knowledge basis, and then Atlantis Found, by Clive Cussler. Okay, here’s a
novel with a least two cataclysm-purification scenarios and an extensive
exploration of the legend of Atlantis.
(For discussion of Disney’s Atlantis movie, see(this).) Cussler proposes
that Atlantis actually was underneath present day His other idea,
that a neo-Nazi group could try to recreate the Flood (I’ll give that away)
to set itself up for world domination, is an idea that goes beyond fluffy,
genre entertainment and proposal that
I personally might take quite seriously and not think to be “funny.” Psychologically, it reinstitutes the idea
that only “superior people” should flourish and be cared about, and this not
what Ayn Rand intended to propose with Atlas
Shrugged (1957). So, here we have a
genre thriller with big ideas and a kind of tongue-in-cheek
don’t-take-me-too-seriously action paradigm, with a James Bond character, in
this case, Dirk Pitt. Now Pitt is
supposed to have excelled at everything manly and military (Eagle scouts, Air
Force Academy, NUMA (the fictitious National Underwater and Marine
Agency)—and according to the narrative seems to display almost no
sexuality. Maybe that’s Okay under
don’t ask, don’t tell. Actually, I
know a few younger men in the military who are a bit like this
character. (So I don’t know if Pierce Brosnan would be happy with the role in the inevitable
movie.) But Cussler
seems to indeed duck the deeper questions (“what does it mean to be a
man??”), as if he were not qualified to answer them. He is, after all, a corporate entertainer. For a discussion
of
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