Glorious

April 15, 2020
The third and presumably final installment about a hard-science space odyssey whose purpose is to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy. Previously, our starship encountered the Bowl, a vast, steerable object that wanders space capturing and enslaving alien species to occupy its unimaginably huge living space. Having wrestled the Bowl's birdlike boss species to a standstill in the sequel, Captain Redwing and crew planted a thriving colony there. Now, the starship finally attains its original destination, Glory, a planetary system whose orbital dynamics prove artificially engineered and enormously more complex than remote surveillance indicated. The Bowl, it emerges, directed by ancient, patient alien Ice Minds, has met the Glory system's controlling intelligences before--and they are not best buds. Like its predecessors, this adventure is clotted with technical detail (what was it Twain said about never letting the facts get in the way of a good story?), nearly all of it skippable. Biologists Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash (they're an item) visit the alien planets and encounter a parade of mind-bogglingly implausible critters, some lethal, some highly intelligent, some merely ridiculous, in a narrative peppered with borrowings, often annoying, from Brian Aldiss' classic Hothouse (1962). Redwing, meanwhile, heads for a gigantic living spaceship and a meeting with Glory's weird head honcho; this offers the authors scope to write impressive exchanges wherein resourceful humans augmented by AI are not altogether overmatched. Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult--so, just about worth the effort.

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April 20, 2020
The disappointing third space opera in the Bowl of Heaven series from hard sci-fi doyens Benford and Niven (after 2014’s Shipstar) returns to a galaxy in which extraterrestrial life-forms have created a “vast bowl built to capture and refocus a star’s own radiation” used for space-faring adventures. Instead of expanding on this imaginative premise, Benford and Niven focus on the thinly-drawn human crew of the spaceship SunSeeker, among them husband-and-wife biologist team Cliff Kammash and Beth Marble. SunSeeker’s exploration of the galaxy leads the crew to encounter a series of bizarre extraterrestrial beings, including carnivorous kangaroo-like creatures and a benevolent, many-armed alien given the distractingly cutesy nickname Twisty. Throughout, the authors introduce exciting but underdeveloped concepts—sentient plasma, miniature black holes—that casual readers will struggle to grasp. Benford and Niven also lean too heavily on genre convention: the expendable crew members used to establish the stakes will put readers in mind of the redshirts on Star Trek, and Twisty’s unconventional dialogue occasionally veers into Yoda territory (“You tired must be from journeys”). This does not live up to expectations.