Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston

Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston.  Forge Books, 2007.  414 pp.  978-0-7653-1105-4.

... 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.

The Kingdom of Ohio, by Matthew Flaming

The Kingdom of Ohio, by Matthew Flaming.  Penguin, 2009.  328 pp.  978-0-425-23694-9.

... in which the princess of Ohio and a young construction worker in 1901 New York City shape history and find themselves caught up in a struggle between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

This is a difficult book to summarize or categorize.  The main setting is 1901 New York City, though it may or may not be the same 1901 NYC from our timeline.  The story is also set in Los Angeles, probably in the 1990s, where the narrator lives. Peter Force is a young man who has moved from the wilds of northern Idaho (Kellogg, ID, if you must know) to NYC to be a construction worker on the new underground railroad system.  One evening Peter encounters a distressed young woman, who claims to be Cheri-Anne Toledo, the daughter of the king of Ohio.  She claims to have survived the assassination of her family, and was suddenly transported through space and time from 1894 Toledo to 1901 New York.  Claiming to be a student of famed inventor Nikola Tesla, Cheri-Anne attributes her travel to her work on a teleportation device.  However, after going to visit Tesla, she finds that he has no idea who she is, suggesting that not only did she travel through space and time, but that she also traveled between parallel universes.  Peter and Cheri-Anne find themselves caught between Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Edison's financier J.P. Morgan, all of whom are using the subway construction project to search for something hidden below the ground.  The outcome of their struggle could change all of history and time.

Inverted World, by Christopher Priest

Inverted World, by Christopher Priest.  New York Review Books, 1974.  322 pp.  978-1-59017-269-8.

... in which a city built on wheels is slowly pulled north on rails, in order to escape the crushing gravitational field behind it.

Probably one of the stranger science fiction books I have ever read, Inverted World requires a high tolerance for the genre of hard sci-fi.  Hard sci-fi, generally considered to be the branch of science fiction that most deals with actual science, tends to be a little less palatable to the general public because there is less talk of light-speed space ships and aliens, and more talk of the mathematical/physical limitations that the technology of modern man faces.  In keeping with the hard science background of hard sci-fi, Inverted World also keeps with the spirit of classical sci-fi in that it is, at its core, an analysis and discussion of the current human condition, albeit in a stranger setting.

The plot of Inverted World is set in the city of Earth, which is basically a large wooden building on wheels. Although the city itself is "civilized", the land it moves through has been ravaged by some sort of collapse of civilization, and most people outside are living on the edge of survival.  Most of the people in the city are unaware of the true nature of the city; the only ones who are "in the know" are the guildsmen.  The guilds are responsible for keeping the city ahead of the gravitational distortion that is constantly moving, and is currently to the south of the city.  The goal for the city is to reach a point known as the "optimum", where the appropriate balance exists between the gravitational distortions to the south and to the north.  However, since these distortions are always moving, the "optimum" is always moving, and the city is perpetually falling further and further south of it.  The main character, Helward Mann, is a young man who has recently joined the guilds.  Apparently the guilds enjoy teaching through experience, because the norm is to throw the young apprentices into their work with no explanation, and to let them find out the weird truth of reality for themselves.  Over time, as Helward begins to realize just how strange and dire the city's circumstances are, he begins to understand why the secrecy surrounding the guilds exists.  As he begins to subscribe to the guild secrecy and guild doctrine, his new wife, Victoria, starts pumping him for details on why the guilds exist and what it's like outside of the city.  As the city's situation becomes more and more desperate, the people of the city begin clamoring for change, and while outside of the city, Helward meets a young woman named Elizabeth who has an important revelation for Helward and the other inhabitants of the city of Earth.  Although Elizabeth's big revelation is deliberately obvious to the reader from the beginning, it is, of course, a complete paradigm shift for the people of the city.

It's very difficult to describe why the world is distorted, and in what ways the world is distorted, without adding significant spoilers to the review.  I will try to discuss the story without spoilers, but if you are curious, a more thorough discussion is included after the jump below.  Fantastical setting aside, this story could easily be read as a political allegory.  Helward starts out as a bright eyed young recruit, naive to the ways of the world and not quite prepared for the importance of his role in the guilds.  At first, the secrecy seems ridiculous to him, but over time, he falls into a pattern of acceptance of guild doctrine: this is how it was laid down for us, it's always worked, it will always continue to work.  Even as the city erupts into revolution, Helward clings tightly to his outdated doctrine, refusing to believe the news that Elizabeth brings.

The guilds themselves are pretty draconian in the way they deal with both the residents of the city, and the people who live in the lands outside of the city.  Because they need more physical labor than is available in the city, the guilds must employ men from outside the city.  They do this by offering the villages food from within the city, and because the villages are starving, they generally accept the poor offerings.  Even if they didn't accept, the city's militia would soon come through and wipe out any opposition.  Worse, the city's birthrate has become dangerously skewed in favor of male babies, with the estimate at 76 boys to 14 girls currently living in the city's nursery.  Because of the desperate need for females, and because this birthrate bias only exists with women born in the city, the city "borrows" women from the surrounding villages, for the purposes of reproduction.  If the woman gives birth to a girl, the girl stays in the city.  If the woman gives birth to a boy, then the woman can either take the child with her or leave him behind when she is returned to her home village.  The city's imperialistic attitude towards the people around them does eventually come back to haunt him, when the villages around them begin to revolt.  And because the city only moves at a rate of about one mile every ten days, they can't exactly outrun the rioting natives.

I really enjoyed the intricacies of the geometric anomalies that the people of this book encounter; clearly Priest put a great deal of effort into the physical setting.  It adds a great deal of urgency to the city's mission, and explains why the guilds are so dedicated to a system that seems to work, albeit imperfectly.  Like I said before, the majority of the truth that Elizabeth brings to the city is never hidden from the reader, so the ending is not a great twist for the reader.  Because the majority of the book is told from Helward's perspective, and he spends most of his time outside of the city, it's hard to get a continuous picture of the gradual increasing unrest with the city's population.  I would have liked to have seen more of that, because from Helward's perspective, the guilds went from ignoring the dissenters one day, and then pandering to them the next.  Helward's seemingly backwards character development is also frustrating, since he went from questioning the antiquated system to accepting it with zeal.  I suppose this was  a necessary plot element, for reasons that are hard to reveal without ruining the ending, and it served as a good plot device for demonstrating the power of culturally entrenched dogma.  The ending was a little bit of a let down, as it was really open.  We don't know what will happen to the city and its people, now that their world has been turned upside down.  If you're a fan of open endings, you'll probably like this.  I am not generally a fan of open endings, except in special circumstances, so this was a little unsatisfying for me.

In short, this is a really satisfying read for fans of hard sci-fi, and is only slightly diminished by the limited perspective of its main character.  Although it was written in 1974, the writing doesn't feel dated at all, and the subject matter remains as relevant today as it was in the 70s.  For readers who don't have at least a rudimentary understanding of physics, calculus, and geometry, however, this might prove to be a bit of a challenging read.

4/5 stars.  Continue reading for a lengthier discussion of the weird geometry of the city of Earth.  Spoilers!!

The Book of God and Physics, by Enrique Joven

The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery, by Enrique Joven. Harper Collins, 2007. 347 pp. 978-0-06-145687-9.

... in which a Jesuit priest solves a centuries-old mystery.

If The DaVinci Code was based in solid fact, and if Dan Brown possessed any writing skills whatsoever, I suspect that The DaVinci Code would have ended up being a great deal like this novel. The two novels are similar in that both plots revolve around a mysterious religious text. In this case, however, the mysterious text in question is actually real, and is kept at Yale University.

The Voynich Manuscript is a set of handwritten pages from sometime around the early 1400s. It is written in an unidentified language and an unknown script, and has thus far defied every attempt to translate it. Ancient scholars tried, and modern cryptographers and mathematicians and computer scientists have also failed. The manuscript is full of detailed illustrations, and seems to cover many topics, from astronomy to biology to medicine.

The Book of God and Physics is fairly unique, since a great deal of the people and objects and locations in the novel are very real. The only fabrications for the story are the three central characters. The main character is a young Jesuit priest, Hector, who lives in a monastery and teaches physics and math at a Jesuit high school in Spain. In his free time, he joins hundreds of other people around the world in an online community devoted to solving the Voynich Mystery. Along with two friends, Juana from Mexico and John from England, he begins to piece together clues to the manuscript. Over time, they find that the manuscript is very much a part of the Jesuit Order's history. Along with working on the manuscript, Hector must help his fellow priests in saving their monastery from being bought by developers and destroyed to make room for a parking lot. With one of his students, Hector also gets swept up in a research project involving Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, the very famous astronomers of old. The three separate plotlines eventually come together.

I have only a few complaints about the book. The pacing was a little too slow. However, I am at a loss to explain how this problem might be fixed. The issue is that the story involves a very large amount of explanation, including a detailed history of the Voynich Manuscript itself, and a very very detailed history of the lives of Kepler, Brahe, and other historically significant people of their day. As a rough estimate, I would guess that somewhere between 30% and 40% of the book is devoted to historical background. Unfortunately, a great deal of this background is necessary to understand the intricacies of the plot itself. So, if you have little to no interest in people like Kepler and his contemporaries, this is most likely not the book for you. I wish the ending had been a little clearer, and I wish that we'd get to see what the translated Voynich Manuscript says, but since the real manuscript hasn't been deciphered at all, I think it was probably a safe choice to leave that to the reader's imagination. Finally, I feel like something might have been slightly lost in translation, as some of the dialogue occasionally feels artificial. However, that's a trait I notice in most translated works that I read, so I don't consider this to be a significant issue at all.

As for the plot itself, I thought it was nicely developed and I felt like the mystery unfolded well. There were no huge shocks, but nor was it a predictable plot. The main character, Hector, is well developed, and certainly feels like he could be a real person. His friends Juana and John are somewhat less well characterized, but they have far fewer scenes than Hector. In John's case, I don't think the slight lack of development is an issue, but in Juana's case, I could perhaps have used a little more background, especially in light of the directions taken by her character in the latter third of the story.

The intersection of history, science, and religion is very nicely explored in this book. Written by a Spanish astrophysicist with a Ph.D., there is a lot of talk of astronomy and some talk of math and physics. None of this drags the story down; rather, the science nicely accents the plot without dominating. Since Hector is a Jesuit priest, there is the constant backdrop of his religious order, but the religion doesn't dominate the story, and Juana and John are from different religious backgrounds themselves (Juana is evangelical Protestant, and John is an atheist). For those of you who don't know, the Jesuit order in the Catholic church is a brotherhood devoted to education and science. There is some exploration of Protestantism vs Catholicism, but not a great deal and mostly at the end. Unusual for this blog, this book's story and the history explained in it could be one argument for how religion isn't always trying to destroy science. The Catholic Church, under John Paul II, was very accepting of Darwinism and evolution, and the Big Bang Theory, describing the origin of the universe ~14 billion years ago, was actually developed by a Jesuit priest and cheerfully accepted by the Vatican.

In short, if you're interested in physics and astronomy, or in ancient mysteries, or in the Jesuit order, or in people like Kepler and Brahe, this is recommended reading. If you don't care for these topics, though, it could prove to be a ponderous, slow read! Definitely a book for a specific target audience.

"Actually, it is noteworthy that this theory of evolution has gradually entered the investigators' spirits, due to a series of discoveries in diverse fields of knowledge. The convergence of results, in no way intended to provoked in studies conducted independently, is a significant argument in itself in favor of this theory." ~Pope John Paul II, in support of evolution and Darwinism. Qtd page 337 in The Book of God and Physics

4/5 stars.