Okay, I finally finished this — but, frankly, I'm not sure it was worth the time spent. Oh, don't get me wrong: this was interesting enough to warrant four stars. But in some way, it was still a chore to read.The basic idea: Brunner created a completely alien world (humanity plays no role whatsoever in this story) and follows the development of their intelligent species beginning with the technologically primitive and ending with their escape to the stars as a space-faring civilization.But he ha...

This book was very well executed -- the passage of intelligent life through the process of civilization; discoveries, inventions, the slow shift from superstition and magic to science and exploration. I did get bogged down for a while trying to visualize the main characters and the environments that they lived in. The novel jumps forward through the timeline similar to Asimov's Foundation stories, so although the characters change in each section, there remains some continuity. I'm not a huge fa...

For my personal taste in reading enjoyment, I might give it a bit more than 3 stars.I'm torn. This is what they call an "ambitious novel". It portrays a non-human alien race as the only characters. Their planet is in a star system traveling thru the galaxy - causing them to experience passage thru dust clouds, radiation, meteors, etc. The book is a series of episodes in their civilization's history from something like the Bronze Age to the first space flight. It shows how superstition and myth t...

Having some trouble getting into this book so far. It jumps right into the story without any setup so I'm trying to figure out the "rules" of this world and it's peoples. Having trouble visualizing the characters - they have mandibles, but reproduce by budding - so a cross between a tree and an insect? Hmm hopefully this will be cleared up.Never really got a clear reading on what these aliens look like. The history of their peoples was slightly interesting. But as far the story goes it was hard

Wonderful sci-fi! Follows the entire development of a culture, religions, and science on an alien world as they evolve. Each chapter is a few thousand years after the previous, so it's not a character-based book. It's an idea book. Fun to read, which gets it three stars. It made me go out and look at the night sky differently. That got it four.

John Brunner is best known for his meticulously researched near-future dystopias like Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. This isn't like that; it's a millenia spanning epic about jellyfish-lobster-crayfish things battling natural disasters caused by meteors and radar flares and such like... but it's also recognisably Brunner in it's rigorous exploration of an imagined world. Like The Squares of the City over-commitment to the central conceit (here that all civilisations rise to a height be...

This is one heck of an ambitious book, charting the history of an entire planetary civilisation, from the discovery of metal-working up to their first spaceflight, and without a single Human in sight.Each section of the book is a snapshot into the (never named) world of 'the folk', the first following the invention of the first telescope and the beginnings of astronomy, and then the discovery that their solar system is heading right into a crowded area of space, where collisions or disturbances

Brunner tends, in my experience, to be a realist in his science fiction. My favorite novels, Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, are both social prognostications which, at the time of their composition, appeared quite relevant.This, too, is a realist novel in the broader sense of maintaining the conventions of the prevailing scientific faith. As such, it is very much in the tradition of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. The presumption is that there is a single, common cosmos out there abou...

A wonderful saga of a very alien world.

Brunner extrapolates from current events in many of his books, and this one is especially topical. Discussing climate change in our world right now is fraught with established political stresses and not much is said that is outside the talking points. In this novel (published presciently in 1983, two decades before "An Inconvenient Truth") Brunner takes the reader through thousands of generations of an intelligent species at risk because of global changes. In this case, it's got to do with galax...

This book is about a people on a planet - how their cultures and bodies evolve, how their ideas change, how they somehow move through time, averting disaster again and again. They're different from us, ingeniously so, but they're also very similar. So much so, that if kids read this in high school, it would probably be a good thing for the world. It may be a fictional story starring liquid-filled bug people, but there's more to it than that - it's very instructive to read and ponder it, and to t...

This is an almost surreal bizarro science fiction novel. I read it many years ago, it is not for the casual Sci-fi readers. Written from the point of view of a Alien species that developed under the ocean of their planet. If you hate Sci-fi novel that have alien liefforms that are too much like humans this is a great one to read.

John Brunner creates a skillfully wrought, fully realized world, full of sentient creatures we resemble in all the important and embarrassing ways even though we look nothing alike. Well worth your time. Quite the prize find from the $1 rack at Half Price books.

A very moving novel from Brunner who describes the fate of another specie, figthing against time for its survival

Stories with aliens always bear something artificial, as if the author really looked for a manner to tell something, whatever it is. In a way, we could say that all the authors choose a manner to tell anything - after all, since the collapse of neoclassicism, art unlinked itself from representation. There's no reason why it should go the same with litterature.The Crucible of Time proposes a reflexion about long span, an idea coined by the French historian Fernand Braudel. That is, slow - and obv...

I loved this book. Yes, it is hard to read and the author never really describes the main species, "the folk", enough for you to easily associate with them. There are reviews that there are no emotional connections. I say this is a book that demands you focus, go back sometimes and read sections again, and allow yourself to step outside of your concepts of consciousness and technology. If you commit to it you will be rewarded with a rich, emotional story spanning many eras that explores the huma...

review of John Brunner's The Crucible of Time by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 26, 2017 I've already thoroughly praised Brunner in many other reviews but I had the vague feeling that I might've exhausted my praise for him insofar as I thought that anything I might read new by him wdn't surprise me. I was wrong. The Crucible of Time surprised me, it was significantly different from anything I'd already read by him & satisfyingly epic. The Foreword establishes what I assume to've been the

An epic sci-fi novel about the progression of history and culture onan alien planet peopled by an insect-like sentient race.The 'novel' is really six separate stories, each dealing with amomentous point in their history. It follows the race from a primitivesociety to a spacefaring people who desperately need to escape fromthe asteroid belt that threatens their planet. In each story, abrilliant young person with groundbreaking ideas must fight to take acultural step forward.Although the book's no...

Nope. How much do I care about the main characters? Exactly nope.I usually give myself at least 50 pages or a quarter of the book to decide if I really want to bail. It was a struggle to push myself even that far here. I was willing to be dropped in media res with zero exposition, up until I realized I was totally unimpressed with the quality of the writing itself and completely indifferent to the characters and their situation.