High hopes

Because benford has written some good science fiction, but they were dashed as at about 80% through it turned into a thriller just trying to horrify between appearances of the deadly particle, and combat scenes that were pretty ridiculous. DNF ( )

En unas excavaciones arqueológicas griegas, en una antigua tumba micénica, es descubierto un curioso artefacto: un cubo de piedra caliza negra, con un adorno de ámbar parecido a un cuerno en su parte delantera, tres líneas de inscripciones, y una tablilla de marfil que muy bien puede ser un mapa. Pero lo más curioso es que el cubo, en una tumba perteneciente a una civilización que depositaba a la vista todas sus ofrendas a los muertos, está oculto tras gruesos bloques de piedra....

Mientras, la situación política en Grecia esta cada vez más alterada: un partido único, controlado por los militares ocupa el poder; se produce la salida de la OTAN, y un acercamiento al bloque soviético; la guerra con los turcos es inminente....En medio de este entorno de inseguridad, el equipo arqueológico estadounidense intenta estudiar, cada vez más perplejo, el sorprendente hallazgo. Y las circunstancias, por extraños derroteros, llevarán, tras muchas vicisitudes, a los investigadores a una sorprendente conclusión: dentro del artefacto hay algo completamente fuera de lugar: una partícula extraña, una especie de singularidad; y esa singularidad tiene un gemelo perdido en alguna parte, buscándola incesantemente; y, en el momento en el que por fin se encuentren, puede producirse una terrible hecatombe...

I have to admit that this review is based on having speed-read Artifact so that I only picked up maybe 20% of the words. I don't normally do that, but I couldn't help it once I realized that my plan to break out of a months-long not-reading-anything rut by picking up a guaranteed sugar rush—an old Gregory Benford technothriller that, as I remembered from having flipped through it in an airport bookstore or something long ago, is about physicists and military creeps fighting to possess an ancient plot object that probably contains a tiny black hole or the like; cool!—hadn't taken into account that Benford, when he's in setup mode and doing a lot of mundane international intrigue stuff while keeping the cool science thing mostly offstage, can be unbearably boring and kind of unpleasant. He is way too into this filler material: endless travelogue passages, endless arguments with stereotyped foreign antagonists about who has authority over what… and at least 10,000 occurrences of the male protagonist thinking that the female one is really hot, while she is thinking that he's a sexist oaf but there's still something strangely fascinating about him, etc. (will his condescending thoughts about her repressed emotions turn out to be exactly right? will they eventually get together and produce a few hasty sentences of cringe-worthy sex prose? what do you think?). That's basically the first two-thirds of the book and I was not digging it in the least. I persevered only because I wanted to see the cool science thing, dammit.

And eventually you do! There follows some procedural lab mystery stuff, and Benford (a retired astrophysicist) is, as usual, quite good at writing about scientists doing their jobs; they even turn into somewhat more interesting characters as long as that's going on. The theoretical physics stuff is pretty cool and, I think, not too badly explained although I have no idea whether it's interesting if you're not such a science nerd. Then the villains return and cause a bunch of escalating problems with the artifact and we're chasing it across the ocean floor and the book is suddenly a really entertaining technothriller with very little chaff. This could have all started about 200 pages earlier so I can only assume that Benford had a vastly excessive page count obligation in his book deal, or else he just found himself really enjoying writing about vaguely described archeological proceedings, creepy romantic tension, and above all, tough guys arguing.

Now, when you get toward the end of a book like this—where there is one main villain who has caused all this trouble by wanting to possess the dangerous SF object, and everyone is like "No, it's too dangerous, you don't understand!", and he's like "Raar, I will possess it, you can't stop me!"—there is really just one event you're waiting for. This event must happen. (Stop reading here if you really can't see where this is going and want to maintain suspense for the least surprising thing ever, even though the genre tradition really relies on you knowing how this works and eagerly awaiting it.) It must happen, and it does! Benford pulls out some pretty impressive and gruesome special effects as that guy gets his ironic just deserts (although it'd be more ironic if he'd actually brought this about by one last arrogant decision, like opening an Ark or something, instead of just randomly choosing to stand in the wrong place while menacing our heroes). It's the cheesiest possible plot resolution in an extremely '80s way, and I may have laughed out loud in appreciation of its shamelessness and its undeniably snazzy execution. Then there's a happy ending and some not-bad but very rushed "here's the SF explanation for some mythology" stuff.

So that's my big reading achievement for this fall: maybe 20% of Artifact, out of which I can highly recommend maybe a quarter. ( )

Excellent scientific thriller about the attempts to locate and contain a monopole. Benford does a great job describing how science is really done. ( )

While this is hard science fiction that might turn off some, if you like a good artifact story the you don't want to pass it up. The book might drag to those not interested in science in a few places, but one can skip that to "get back to the action" if you want without losing too much of the story itself (personally I found it fascinating). There is a lot of mystery and action in addition to the hard science I mentioned earlier making it a worthwhile read to more that those interested in hard science fiction ( )