Doomsday Conspiracy - Sidney Sheldon

With this, I have completed all of Sidney Sheldon’s books. I started reading this author’s works when I was 17. Found them interesting then. As I grew and graduated to more serious reading, I found them not so mind blowing.
Most of them were mediocre. But some of them were really good. My favourite ones are the following.

If Tomorrow Comes
Master of the Game
Sands of Time
Windmills of Gods
The Other Side of Midnight
Tell me your Dreams

I must admit that the author has traveled and researched extensively. All of his books give you some interesting and authentic information. World famous paintings, museums, multiple personality disorder, weather controlling machines, extra terrestrial beings…and so on…

Doomsday conspiracy is based on extra terrestrial beings.
This book was thoroughly disappointing.
First of all, the first 200 pages are very predictable. There is neither suspense nor any thrill.
Next, it was like watching a movie full of guest appearances, where the protagonists have a small role to play. :-(
Ten witnesses to a flying saucer that crashed in Switzerland are eliminated one by one. This is because the governments of various countries want a blanket of secrecy over UFO’s so that the masses don’t panic.
What good is it to eliminate innocent witnesses to a crash when hundreds of incidents of UFO sightings are reported by people all over the world day in and day out??? There is no credibility to the plot…
And then the killings take up a good 150 to 200 pages of the book (the guest appearances) one witness after another dying in some accident or another… Boring! 2 to 3 pages have been dedicated for each of the witnesses, for the purpose of giving some background information about the mundane, uninteresting lives they have lead. Totally wasted!

If I remember correctly, all of Sidney Sheldon’s protagonists are female. This one is different because the protagonist is a male. Robert Bellamy, a commander.

For a change this one has much less titillation compared to other works of his. And I am happy about it because as far as this author is concerned, the physical relationship between men and women in most of his works is devoid of any art or deep rooted sentiment. It is plain lust. The descriptions are gory with raw titillation; there is a complete absence of art or erotica; just plain pornography on paper to sell the book better…commercializing love or sex has never appealed to me…something I abhor…

As for the language, there were a lot of new words that I had to refer the dictionary for, but no one liner or quotation worth mentioning.
I liked this one: When the commander meets the professor for the first time; a tall thin man with untidy white hair wearing a tattered sweater, he thinks to himself.
“I wonder if he had created the image (of an archetypal professor) or the image had created him.”

There is an interesting mention of a notion that plants can feel just like humans. I call it a notion, not because I don’t believe it is a fact but because the idea is yet to gain total acceptability. To substantiate, the authors refers to experiments conducted by scientists and the results that prove plants can think and feel.
I now want to study this subject more seriously.