Bowl of Heaven
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Tor mass market paperback, $8.99
ebook $7.69 Kindle $8.99 Nook

You know you’re getting behind on your reading when a book you bought as soon as it appeared in hardcover is out in paperback before you get around to reading it.

I’ve been a fan of large scale, big idea science fiction almost as long as I’ve been reading science fiction.  That means I’m a fan of both of the authors of this novel, although I’ve read more Niven than I have Benford.  But I enjoy them both.

So when a collaboration between them came out, I grabbed it pretty quickly.  Not surprisingly, they’ve come up with a large scale artifact I’ve not encountered before.

A starship has been sent by humanity to investigate some irregularities around a star.  Because of the distance, the bulk of the crew is in coldsleep.  The starship is a ramjet, a sublight propulsion system that uses magnetic fields to scoop up interstellar hydrogen as fuel for a fusion reactor.  But there’s a problem.  They aren’t traveling as fast as they should and are going to run short of supplies before they reach their destination.

Then they discover another starship, not one of theirs, is heading towards the same star they are.  This starship is the size of a solar system.  It’s an artificial shell half around a red dwarf star that manipulates the star’s plasma for propulsion.  This is the part that was a new idea for me.

It also contains life.  The crew decides to stop and land on the object.  Of course things go wrong.  The landing party is separated, with half of them being captured by the aliens that control the object and the other half escaping and being on the run.

This was an enjoyable read, and I love the artifact, but the whole thing had a sense of deja vu to it.  What the object essentially is is a giant Ringworld.  In fact it’s called Cupworld more than once.  I think the authors were having a little fun with some of Niven’s previous work set in another universe.

Cupworld has been cruising the galaxy for thousands of years, picking up species as it goes along, including some from Earth’s distant past, before man evolved to his present state.  So the aliens the group on the run encounters are interesting.

My biggest complaint is that while things did come  to a lull in the action while different people and aliens regrouped, there was no actual climax.  The ending had the feel of “Okay, we need to end the first book here because of length” to it.  While I can understand that, it was a little annoying.

But these are minor quibbles.  Bowl of Heaven is a well thought-out novel, with the concepts rigorously worked out.  The characters are reasonably three dimensional for a cast the size of this one, especially the aliens.  The second volume, Shipstar, is due out next month.  I’ll be picking it up.