From the other reviews on this book, you would think it's a serious study on the face. It isn't, it's a novel, set in the year 2040, with the idea of the face on Mars as a backdrop. While the face makes a great plot device (witness the recent movie, Mission to Mars), it isn't used to good effect here. In the author's preface, he states that he seeks to inform as well as entertain, by making a half-hearted attempt to do both, he actually manages to do neither. The book is under two hundred pages, but feels much longer. Characters aren't developed, the plot is neither suspenseful or engaging, and the writer too often makes the novice mistake of too often telling us, rather than showing us, the action. To be fair, Allen obviously has a lot of interest in outer space, but his 'research' comes across as simple opinions, like a learned professor out to teach the rest of us. Some of those opinions are not only outspoken, but even irritating, such as his theory that the Big Bang never happened, without even offering any viable alternative as to what else could have created the universe in the first place. According to the author, the poor Martian civilization in the book didn't even create it's own culture. I won't go on about that, though, because I wouldn't want to ruin the suspense...
This book could have more ably accomplished all it's goals by simply making itself a more entertaining read. People tend to believe the information imparted in the movie JFK because it was presented so skillfully. If the author would have used the typical structure any novelist uses when building up his story, it would have at least been entertaining, as it is this book reads more like a bad science paper.
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