While his collaboration with authors such as Gentry Lee on other novels seems to have drawn Clarke a little further into character development in The Ghost of the Grand Banks, Clarke still shows his tendency to give quick summary strokes of background and personality, then to set his characters in motion in brief episodes. The medium-short novel, in fact, has four major sections entitled "Prelude," "Preparations," "Operations," and "Finale," and it is closed by a short chapter of acknowledgments and an appendix that explains in everyday language the basics of the Mandelbrot set of calculations and the geometric patterns they describe. Within the four major sections are enclosed forty-four individual chapters, some as short as two pages of text.

Certain chapters are headed by quotations, giving some a documentary style and others a technical report style. Chapter 15 opens with a selection explaining the Mandelbrot Set, an excerpt from...