The Impossible Dream: The spectacular rise and fall of Steorn, the Celtic Tiger's most audacious start-up

A tremendous read. The book is not only a history of one of the weirdest companies to emerge in the last 20 years (anyone I mentioned Steorn to would inevitably say "oh yeah, those guys! Whatever happened to them?"), it's also a precis of the sheer madness that overtook Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years.

Great book. Such an odd story that has been unfolding for years. This is as close to a definitive account as we’ll get.

I don't think I have been more annoyed by a book for years. It presumes you know the story and gives away what is going to happen at every single opportunity so there is absolutely no flow and nothing to hook you.It says a meeting will be a disaster before telling you about the meeting. It tells you people will not like the product before talking about them seeing it.the book is highly detailed but the writing style is awful.

I followed Steorn after the Economist ad, and even became part of their SPDC/SKDB. I was skeptical, but never could figure out how such a company could continue operations year, after year, after year or how something they thought they could so easily demonstrate could fail so many times. For someone interested in the story of Steorn, this book has an amazing amount of in-depth information about the historical context, the people, and the twists and turns as the story progressed.I enjoyed reading the book and learning about some of what was going on behind the scenes.

This is a well written and fairly balanced history of Steorn and the company's claim to have achieved overunity: that is, the generation by a device of more energy than what is pumped into it (layman's definition!) It offers vignettes of almost all the players over the course of more than a decade: the CEO's and upper management of Steorn, most notably Shaun McCarthy, who bravely emerges several times in the text( from his ignominious fall and loss of reputation) to discuss his role in the company--from its meteoric rise as an upstart firm challenging the Laws of Thermodynamics to its inevitable decline as it failed to produce a working model of its device. Vignettes of investors are also a plus. They are portrayed not so much as looking for a quick buck (euro would be more appropriate, I guess), but motivated in many cases with a desire to invest in a game-changing device whose production of "free energy" would go a long way towards saving a compromised planet. The fact that Steorn appeared on the scene during the era of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland's version of the "Roaring Twenties," contributed greatly to the company's ability to gain impressive amounts of money from those investors. All in all, the book provides a cautionary tale illustrating the dangers of falling prey to Greenspan's irrational exuberance (as in the dot.com bust). While many would point to McCarthy as the villain here--and he was the charismatic spokesperson who drew people into investing in Steorn--he appears himself to be the victim of his own convictions. Like so many of the company's investors, he talked himself into buying the impossible dream. Unfortunately, his Orbo turned out to produce not excess energy but an excess of enthusiasm that, in Shakespeare's words, only ended up being "consumed with that which it was nourished by."