Equal parts Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer, Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker, Gregory Benford's Eater is a book fans of his Nebula Award winning 1980 novel Timescape or his 1997 Cosm will find easy to enjoy.
Like its predecessors, Eater (Avon, $24.00) is a tight, fast-paced near-future hard SF thriller with most of the action taking place in symposia, laboratories and the minds of its research scientist protagonists.
As the book opens, Benjamin and Channing Knowlton, a husband and wife team of radio astronomers at the High Energy Astrophysics Center in Hawaii, discover an anomalous source of gamma radiation in deep space.
At first they assume it is a gamma ray burster, a highly energetic extragalactic phenomenon formed by the collision of a black hole with a large mass of conventional matter.
on a course that will bring it into the solar system.
Its peculiar technique of changing velocity by crashing from heavenly body to heavenly body, processing each for reaction mass, earns it the nickname "The Eater of All Things" -- "Eater" for short.
And it's intelligent. Its power awesome, its motives questionable, Eater begins transmitting its demands to humanity shortly after it gouges a huge scoop out of Jupiter.
As the object heads for Earth, a desperate scramble to comprehend and possibly confront it commences. The urgency is compounded by the fact that Channing is in the final stages of an advanced cancer and hasn't much time to live.
Hardest working man in SF
At times, Eater feels like a really engrossing astronomy class with a plot. The reader will feel excited about the science, because Benford certainly is.
Benford uses his own research in astrophysics and plasma physics to structure a believable and original energy being that uses a tiny black hole as a combined propulsion system, weapons system and food source.
In addition to his award-winning SF, Benford publishes extensively in scientific journals and teaches a full load at the University of California, Irvine. His decades of experience as a teacher ensure that even the most technical terms are explained in a comfortable, easy to understand manner.
It's as if Benford has taken you aside and said "don't feel badly, there's no reason why you should have known this, but now you do."
More than a scientist
While Benford's reputation as one of the best scientists writing in the SF field is well deserved, his writing transcends this genre classification.
His characters are real scientists, with all of the politics of academia -- the cut and parry of the symposium, the petty rivalries and the underhanded bickering that occasionally makes a footnote resemble a playground shoving match -- gloriously intact.
What's more, these are also real people. Benjamin and Channing are truly in love, and Benford handles both her slow, withering death and his grief maturely, with real pathos that never swerves into cheap sentimentality.
Benford also artfully juxtaposes two principal images in the book -- Eater bouncing from asteroid to planet, consuming each and using its energy to move on the next and Channing's metastasizing cancer.
The contrast is an impressive display of Benford's literary talent. It's not for nothing that he's one of only two SF writers ever published in The New Yorker.
Following close on the heels of
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