Tag Archives: gregory benford

Book Review of “Bowl of Heaven” (2012)

bowl of heaven

Cover art for the Benford and Niven novel “Bowl of Heaven”

I just finished reading the 2012 novel Bowl of Heaven authored by two science fiction heavy hitters: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven.

The basic idea is that a colony sleeper ship from Earth on its way to a new system encounters a megastructure in space. This is a sun that has been manipulated so its light thrust is directed allowing the entire solar system to be navigated across the galaxy.

At the back end of the system is essentially a bowl with the surface area of millions of Earths.

It’s more than curiosity that causes the command crew of the starship “SunSeeker” to investigate. Their ramscoop technology has become increasingly inefficient threatening the success of their voyage, so they enter the bowl system looking for answers.

They send a shuttle into the bowl and the landing team, lead by lovers Cliff and Beth, encounters a number of differing beings that seem intelligent. However, when Cliff’s party breaches the airlock, the aliens try to capture them. Beth’s team is scooped up immediately, but Cliff’s people escape.

As you’d expect from “hard science” writers Benford and Niven, details about the “shipstar” system and “bowl world” abound. Parallels to Niven’s “Ringworld” are inevitable.

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Book Review: “The Berlin Project”

berlin project

Cover image for Gregory Benford’s novel “The Berlin Project.”

Just finished reading The Berlin Project, a novel by physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford, and it was fabulous. Really top-notch alternate history, which was given enormous depth by the fact that Benford has met many of the people who were involved in the Manhattan Project during World War Two. His father-in-law is Karl Cohen, who is the book’s protagonist and in real life actually was a chemist on the project.

The novel’s premise is that at the Manhattan Project’s beginning, America’s secret effort to produce the Atomic Bomb, Cohen develops an alternate and faster method of producing weapons grade uranium for “the bomb,” allowing us to make a nuclear weapon in time for D-Day.

Not only are the technical details amazingly accurate, but the characterizations of the people involved, particularly Cohen and his family, are absolutely credible and “real.” Small wonder, since by marriage, they are Benford’s family, too.

As I imagine like most readers, I thought the climax of the book would be dropping the bomb on Berlin in 1944, killing Hitler and ending the war, but I was wrong. True, that was a pivotal moment about three-quarters of the way through, but it was the aftermath to that event that made all of the difference in changing the shape of alternate history going forward.

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Is SciFi Author/Editor Robert Silverberg Really Racist and Sexist (or has the internet once again lost its mind)?

robert silverberg

SF author/editor Robert Silverberg – 2005

If I hadn’t read a blog post at Superversive SF called The Cardinal Mistake With SJWs and Robert Silverberg, I probably wouldn’t be writing this.

First off, I’ll state for the record, that because I’m even mentioning Jon Del Arroz‘s (yes, he deliberately makes himself a lightning rod for controversy) name and daring to write something with a social and political perspective not shared (necessarily) by Democrats, leftists, and progressives (those words are not synonyms), that at least one person will be vocally upset with me here on my blog.

I suspect that a lot of other people who regularly read my fiction will simply not respond because A: they like me and what I write, and B: they think that I’m a nice enough guy not to be flamed for expressing unpopular opinions.

Thank you.

Anyway, I did read Del Arroz’s article which starts out:

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