Crater is a 2012 young-adult science fiction novel by Homer Hickam, and the first in his Helium-3 trilogy. Crater, a teenage lunar miner, accompanies one of his company’s helium-3 convoys in pursuit of an objective that led to the deaths of two others who tried to obtain it.
Hickam has been a coal miner and a NASA engineer. Not surprisingly,
Crater’s lunar mining operations, living conditions, moon physics, and
use of helium-3 are well thought out. There are also a lot of good moon facts
in here, as well. Hickam’s setup and world-building (of the moon, anyway) are
the highlights of the book.
Hickam’s storytelling is less impressive. Crater himself is
hard to root for because even though he’s good-hearted and capable, he’s also a
clueless, pouty bumpkin with inexplicable low self-esteem. Almost every other
character is flat, and many have the reasoning power of small children. The
novel has two kinds of villains, crowhoppers and demons, and not only are they exactly
the same, they’re also largely incompetent. Plot developments and resolutions
are often convenient and unrealistic. The romance is horrendous. The story even
stops for two pages near the end so Hickam can get in a quick sermon against
government regulation. The overall effect is that the novel feels like a Saturday
morning cartoon with a bunch of killing.
Crater features little in the way of suspense, even
though Hickam tries desperately to generate some in the final act using one of
the cheapest writer’s tricks of all time – hiding from the reader plot information
known to all the characters. Nor does the MacGuffin-driven plot attract much
interest, nor the cartoon characters that populate Hickam’s moon.
All of this is really too bad, because Crater felt
like it had a lot of potential when it got started. In the end, though, it was
a disappointment.
NOT RECOMMENDED
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