Review: Bowl of Heaven

Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

There is a type of fantasy I call the Travelogue Fantasy, wherein character and plot are sacrificed to an endless stream of "And then we went to this amazing fantastical place with no relevance to the story; let me describe it in excruciating detail!" And I've recently realized that there is an equivalent in science fiction, where character and plot are sacrificed to an endless series of technical details. I shall call it Tech Porn. And while I prefer some story to my fiction, Tech Porn can actually be kind of fun; it's like a conversation at the pub over maybe one-too-many beers with a bunch of your geek friends; it may not go anywhere, but it can be fun for the ride.

This book is pure Tech Porn, and it gets the technical details consistently and unbelievably wrong.

I don't want to try to list all the things they get wrong - no one wants to read that, and I'd be here for days - but as an example, the CupWorld they describe is "bigger than the orbit of Mercury", rotates once every 10 days, and has an effective "spin" gravity at the rim of 0.8g. The fact that I know all of these things is because the authors take the time to point them out, and this kind of technical detail appears to be the whole point of the novel; Tech Porn, remember? The only problem is that the math doesn't work; a cup of that size spinning that fast would top out at about 0.3g. That's pretty far wrong! And getting one thing wrong is no big deal, but there's one of these sorts of glaring errors about every second page through the whole book. Niven and Benford both have rep as "hard" science fiction writers, and they both can afford a research assistant, or at least an editor who knows their chops and owns a calculator, so there's really no excuse for this. You might forgive it - or even fail to notice it - if it was the backdrop for a compelling and believable narrative about interesting characters, but as I said, there's none of that here. The characters are wooden and serve mostly to make random observations about technical "facts" they would have no way of knowing in any case. The plot is just loopy silly; humans can survive eating alien biology, and learn to speak an alien language from scratch to discussing metaphysics and esoteric grammar in days. And more, the book continuously reminds me of this, by pointing out how astonishing it is that these things are happening, and not bothering to even pretend to have an explanation for why. This is a Tech Porn snuff film, and what's dying is my respect for these authors.

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