Arthur C.Clarke's Venus Prime

Few would deny that Clarke is the most highly acclaimed science fiction writer alive today, and although his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey set the seal on his primacy, it is the remarkable body of work, so consistently inspired over half a century, that has a made him a household name, even to those unfamiliar with the SF genre. In recent years, Clarke has shown a diminishing interest in the genre, and seems happy to engender concepts that are fleshed out into full novels by other hands. That is not quite the case here, as Paul Preuss's highly imaginative and sharply imagined tale is not based on a cursorily written concept but on Clarke's story 'Breaking Strain', written in 1948. In fact, Preuss can even be said to have improved on the famously rudimentary Clarke characterisation with an adroitly-realized heroine, Sparta. Her astonishing beauty is a veil for a hidden past and some surprisingly preternatural abilities, far beyond those of other people. Sparta is a synthetic human being, adrift on earth with no memory of the last three years. Investigating a crippled space freighter called Star Queen is one of the ways in which she is able to investigate the mystery of her identity: and soon she is knee-deep in a plot that requires all her considerable abilities to survive. As a heroine, Sparta is considerably fuller and better thought out that many human protagonists in SF, and Preuss's swift narrative is complemented by a special assortment of computer generated blueprints of the robots and spacecraft in Venus Prime. (Kirkus UK)