{"id":989,"date":"2014-03-21T21:13:24","date_gmt":"2014-03-22T02:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=989"},"modified":"2014-12-25T13:42:24","modified_gmt":"2014-12-25T19:42:24","slug":"benford-and-nivens-bowl-of-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/benford-and-nivens-bowl-of-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Benford and Niven’s Bowl of Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bowlofheaven_NS_20p\"<\/a>Bowl of Heaven<\/em><\/a>
\nGregory Benford<\/a> and Larry Niven<\/a>
\nTor mass market paperback, $8.99
\nebook $7.69 Kindle $8.99 Nook<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’ve been a fan of large scale, big idea science fiction almost as long as I’ve been reading science fiction.\u00a0 That means I’m a fan of both of the authors of this novel, although I’ve read more Niven than I have Benford.\u00a0 But I enjoy them both.<\/p>\n

So when a collaboration between them came out, I grabbed it pretty quickly.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, they’ve come up with a large scale artifact I’ve not encountered before.<\/p>\n

A starship has been sent by humanity to investigate some irregularities around a star.\u00a0 Because of the distance, the bulk of the crew is in coldsleep.\u00a0 The starship is a ramjet, a sublight propulsion system that uses magnetic fields to scoop up interstellar hydrogen as fuel for a fusion reactor.\u00a0 But there’s a problem.\u00a0 They aren’t traveling as fast as they should and are going to run short of supplies before they reach their destination.<\/p>\n

Then they discover another starship, not one of theirs, is heading towards the same star they are.\u00a0 This starship is the size of a solar system.\u00a0 It’s an artificial shell half around a red dwarf star that manipulates the star’s plasma for propulsion.\u00a0 This is the part that was a new idea for me.<\/p>\n

It also contains life.\u00a0 The crew decides to stop and land on the object.\u00a0 Of course things go wrong.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

This was an enjoyable read, and I love the artifact, but the whole thing had a sense of deja vu<\/em> to it.\u00a0 What the object essentially is is a giant Ringworld.\u00a0 In fact it’s called Cupworld more than once.\u00a0 I think the authors were having a little fun with some of Niven’s previous work set in another universe.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 So the aliens the group on the run encounters are interesting.<\/p>\n

My biggest complaint is that while things did come\u00a0 to a lull in the action while different people and aliens regrouped, there was no actual climax.\u00a0 The ending had the feel of “Okay, we need to end the first book here because of length” to it.\u00a0 While I can understand that, it was a little annoying.<\/p>\n

But these are minor quibbles.\u00a0 Bowl of Heaven<\/em> is a well thought-out novel, with the concepts rigorously worked out.\u00a0 The characters are reasonably three dimensional for a cast the size of this one, especially the aliens.\u00a0 The second volume, Shipstar,<\/em> is due out next month.\u00a0 I’ll be picking it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[704,703],"tags":[705,706,785],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gregory-benford","category-larry-niven","tag-gregory-bendford","tag-hard-science","tag-larry-niven"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-fX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}