... in which physicists and religious extremists clash over the building of a supercollider meant to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
Blasphemy is set deep in the Arizona desert, where the world's biggest supercollider is being built beneath a mountain. The purpose of the supercollider, nicknamed Isabella, is to recreate the energy and conditions present at the Big Bang. Leading the team of scientists is brilliant physicist Gregory Hazelius. The US government, after putting $40 billion into this project, is eager to see it succeed, but after the first run of the machine, it's clear that something has gone wrong and the scientists aren't talking. An adviser to the president hires Wyman Ford to go undercover and find out what's going on. In the meantime, the evangelicals of America have worked themselves into a rage over the Isabella Project, which they believe is challenging the word of God. At the same time, the Navajo people, on whose land Isabella has been built, are protesting the project because it's destroying their sacred lands. As Ford tries to balance his mission and the mounting tensions with the evangelicals and the Navajo, he discovers that the secret being hidden by the physicists is big enough to change the world.
This book really reads like a Michael Crichton novel... entirely plot driven, light on characterization. While I would say that usually this would detract from a book, in this case I think it mostly works. Blasphemy reads more like a thriller with a hint of science fiction, and it feels like it was written to be adapted into a two hour movie. There isn't much time for set-up, and Preston has the reader hitting the ground running from the very first page. From there, the plot moves along quickly, never lingering on any particular character too long. We jump from the perspective of Hazelius to Ford to the televangelist Reverend Spates, with several minor characters in between. Each character has their own part to play, and Preston clearly doesn't feel like wasting the reader's time with too many details on the characters themselves. There's so much going on and so many people involved in a medium-length book that it makes sense that some of the characters are going to have to be shoved aside in order to move the plot forward. Based on the events in the book, I think the fast-paced narrative was probably a good choice. Like in an action movie, I didn't really ever feel the need to connect with the characters... mostly I just wanted to see if anyone got blown up or shot.
Having said that, I would have liked the main characters to be a little bit more fleshed out. Wyman Ford is probably the most prominent character in the novel. This is the second Douglas Preston book that has Ford as a character, and he is probably the only one who felt like a real person to me. The other two most important characters, Hazelius and Reverend Spates, feel like caricatures. George Hazelius, one of the most brilliant men in the world, is portrayed as a stereotypical super-smart physicist, inflated with his own ego and convinced that what he is doing is always the most important thing ever. Reverend Spates is portrayed as a cartoon-like televangelist, complete with sordid affairs with prostitutes and a fiery passion for bringing lost souls into his mega-church. In the end, Hazelius proves to be more complicated than we ever expected, but that's at the VERY end, and Spates never develops into anything more than a really fake-seeming televangelist. (OK, I know they all seem fake, but I assume that most televangelists have real personalities when they're not on TV?)
The simplified characterization is somewhat forgivable for a novel in this genre. As I said before, it reads like a thriller/action movie script, and anyone who's seen a Michael Bay movie knows that you don't need real characters to produce an exciting action story. However, in the political intrigue and plotting and murders and mysteries, it was really easy to lose site of the supposed theme of the book: the intersection of religion and science. For the majority of the book, it was very easy to forget that Preston was clearly trying to make a deeper point, since a great deal of the book dealt with cartoonishly ridiculous evangelists against the scientists who obviously know what they're doing. The shallow nature of the book seemed poorly matched to the intended depth of the ending, which should have been profound but was instead a little confusing. I would have liked some parts of the book to have been much more prominent, but if those parts had been featured more, then the nature of the book would have moved from thriller to a slower-paced science fiction. I can't say more without spoiling the book entirely but I will say that the ending surprised me. I went in expecting a book about how scientists win everything using SCIENCE, but ended up with something slightly different, something slightly more subtle with a little more gray area. It could have been a beautiful ending that appealed to multiple audiences, but instead it came out being a little wishy-washy and confusing.
So, to sum up, it was a quick engaging read that entertained, but didn't challenge as much as it ought to have. The book was trying to be too many things at once, which detracted from the whole experience. If you're a fan of Michael Crichton-type books, then you'll probably enjoy this one. I hesitate to recommend it to anyone, based on some of the characters. If you're an evangelist, don't read this... it will offend you. If you're moderately religious, or not religious, then you'll be fine, but if you're an extreme, no-compromises-allowed, no-gray-area kind of atheist, then you might want to steer clear as well.
I'm wavering between 2 and 4 stars for this book. 4 stars, because it was an entertaining light read. 2 stars, because I was disappointed by the ending and the hint of what this book could have been (see below). So, as a compromise....
3/5 stars
Ending discussed more thoroughly below. Spoilers!
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The big secret that the physicists are hiding is that when they turn Isabella on, and when they get to Big Bang conditions, they start getting messages on the screen from someone claiming to be God. Initially believing it to be the work of a hacker or prankster, the scientists race to discover the source of the malware, only to find that these messages are coming from within the machine itself. The entity seems to be able to read minds, and knows impossible things. When this gets out to the religious protesters, the world explodes as some people are outraged that scientists could dare to presume that they have seen the words of God, and some people are convinced that this is the real thing. In the end, it comes out that the whole Isabella project was conceived so that Hazelius could secretly launch this computer program to start his own new religion (kind of like L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology). In effect, it was supposed to be a hoax, but Hazelius admits that the program performed far, far beyond its scope, giving answers and knowing things that were not part of its programming. In the end, Hazelius' fake-God-program seemed to be channeling something bigger, and in the end its final message to the scientists was:
Do not repeat the mistake of the historical religions and involve yourselves in disputation about who I am or what I think. I surpass all understanding. I am the God of a universe so vast, only the God numbers can describe it, of which I have given you the first... You are the prophets leading your world into the future. What future will you choose? You hold the key...
I say to you, this is your destiny: to find truth. This is why you exist. This is your purpose. Science is merely how you do it. This is what you must worship: the search for truth itself. If you do this with all your heart, then some great day in the distant future you will stand before Me. This is my covenant with the human race.
You will know the truth. And the truth shall make you free.
p 414
So, basically, in the end, it was proven that God isn't the god known in any religion... God is math, God is science, God is the physical truth of the universe. I feel like Preston could have gone in REALLY interesting directions with this... he could have explored this idea and it would have made this book into something resembling the great books of science fiction, which dared to explore the gray areas of science and human nature. Instead, he blows the machine up and converts all of the scientists into dewy-eyed disciples of their new Messiah, Hazelius. Instead of going out and discovering more awesome things about physics and the Big Bang, they instead choose to get up on a stage, on TV, and address millions of viewers in order to talk about how great Hazelius is. So basically, science televangelism. If I wanted to learn about people preaching on TV about how awesome science is, I'd watch the Discovery Channel. Boo. Booooooo.
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