This is a paragraph from Rockets In Ursa Major, by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. Fred Hoyle was an astronomer and science writer who did a lot of work for the SF Magazines in the Golden Era of SF. He even wrote some SF. He was not a bad writer. He probably knew better, but this is just dreadful.
I climbed in beside the driver. He picked up his punch cards, and selecting the Cambridge one pushed it into the reader. This meant that information was fed to the central transport computer which would work out the best possible route, height and speed for the journey. All this information would then be passed to our destination so that, once we were in the air, automatic homing devices would take over and whisk us to our destination without traffic jams and accidents. The police have their own link-up with this computer. It greatly helps in crime detection, but I fell it is an infringement of individual liberty.
Aside from the rambling sentences, wandering focus, a dearth of commas, and passive tense, the whole thing can be reduced to: “I took a cab to Cambridge” or (if you want to be sciencefictional) “I took a computer controlled cab to Cambridge”.
Fred should have known better.
This started out as a play by Fred Hoyle and was produced in 1962. I could not find any reviews. (Probably better lost in the depths of time). I suspect that his son Geoffrey rewrote it as a novel and that he responsible for the god awful paragraph above.
I am trying to read this on the bus, but I may give up on it. I stopped on page 10 when I hit this paragraph.
And, yes, there is more:
A few seconds later a green light appeared on the control panel. The driver fired up the small rocket motors and we lifted into the air, rising vertically until picked up by a homing frequency. The great advantage of the jet against conventional motor is the the smoothness it offers as well as a slight increase in reliability.
It was a clear night, with the stars getting brighter the higher we went. With a light jolt the helicopter stopped rising and moved off in a forward direction.
2 Comments
Sheesh, and it got published!
Hoyle was a big name. He could get published on his name alone. He was more famous as an Astronomer and was well respected. People would buy his books, even if they were badly written. I have gotten a little further. It’s not a bad book, just full of examples ow how not to write.