Customer Reviews

Artifact

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Perhaps I'm biased because I like Benford's style: I couldn't put the book down. I read it straight through, just stopping once for lunch. It's not Benford's best book because his others are all so great, but it was much better than I expected after reading the other reviews here. Benford mixes in plenty of realistic science, archaeology, and university politics with the action of the plot. At the end of the book, an interesting "Technical Afterword" puts the sci-fi in context with "real" physics.

My favorite line from the book is typical Benford: "He had noted that the noise in a room rose as the square of the number of people in it..."

I was completely enthralled and captivated by Benford's scientific knowledge and writing skills. He has the unique ability to blend insightful scientific speculation with real-life adventure and human interaction.

Artifact is one of those rare science fiction stories that is believable because of the real science it contains. Benford has been critisized for including too much scientific explanation. However, without it, I may not have found the story line as plausible, or enjoyable.

I further enjoyed Benford's writing style. His characters come to life and it is apparent that Benford enjoys writing about adventure and human interactions as much as he does about the science.

All-in-all, I found Artifact very entertaining and would recommend it to anyone remotely interested in science fiction or adventure.

An ancient artefact containing ... what (I won't spoil the joy for readers)? The story began with a tantalising pre-historic sequence of how the artefact was buried with an ancient king but then left the readers with no further 'retrospective' of how the artefact was used (or otherwise ravaged) the ancient world. Cut to the present, the reader is then confronted with huge chunks of irrelevant rivalry amongst academic-types, including a Greek archaeologist unfortunately miscast in an MCP role. All very well but handled badly and detracting seriously from the implications of the Artefact on human history. A wonderful premise by a brilliant author, but needs to be reworked drastically.

The reason that I read books that are described as "science fiction" is, ultimately, for the science fiction. I assume I will be immersed in a world with some kind of unique take on the laws of physics, society, or reality itself. Technically speaking, "Artifact" fulfills those requirements, though it does so in a fairly tedious and uninteresting way.
I can only assume Mr. Benford's publisher is telling their authors to "do something Crichtonesque."
If you are the type of reader who is often confused and bewildered by new ideas, you may enjoy this book. However, if "normalist" SF is really what you're looking for, a much more fulfilling read is Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio."

Benford can be infuriatingly inconsistent in the style and quality of his writing, but the occasional winner keeps me reading his stuff. This one is a combination of speculative particle physics (pretty good), Mycenaean archaeology (acceptable), and neo-fascist Greek machismo politics (mediocre). Claire the archaeologist and John the mathematician are both reasonably well-drawn, but the character of Kontos, the Greek archaeologist-com-colonel, is grotesquely overdone. Unlike most adventure novels, the latter part of the book is actually better written than the early part.

This is a difficult novel to review as it is really three intertwined novellas. The book is divided into three sections, and the story and the action are very different in each of the three. This is a tale of the discovery by a team of archaeologists of an ancient Mycaenaen artifact of immense power. The first part of the story centers around the efforts of the protagonists to smuggle out the unknown artifact. The explanation developed by Benford here is totally implausible. The protagonists are trying to steal an artifact (national treasure really) from its country of origin (Greece) during a coup/civil war for no better reason than to prevent it from falling into the hands of a man who made an inappropriate pass at the main character. A poorly justified, not particularly well written escape/evasion story. After having successfully absconded with it to Boston, MA, they then try to discover what it is. This section is, in my opinion, outstanding, and may, for certain readers, more than justify the cost of the book. Benford writes with incredible accuracy about Cambridge, about MIT and BU, and about how a scientific investigation would proceed if something like this were actually found. I agree though with many of the negative reviewers that Benford (a physicist himself) describes the object and its physics in too much detail for the average reader. This level of detail, while of interest to other physicists, detracts from the story for most readers. The process of investigation into the properties of the artifact by the physicists as described by Benford is, however, absolutely realistic and outstanding, as is his descriptions of the culture and bureaucracy of the Boston universities. If you want to understand how scientists would study such an object in a science fiction setting, this is among the best that has been written. In the third section, they try to recover the artifact after it was stolen by the baddie and returned to Greece. The third section is totally brainless, a mindless `let's send the commandos in and blow everything up' story. Overall, Benford had a good idea with this novel, but it was poorly executed on several levels, and I would not recommend spending your money on this book with the caveat above.

The SF premise -- which you'll get to eventually if you stick with it -- is neat. But most of the actual text is dull. The main character is unlikable -- she's an academic who's irresponsible, immature, drives recklessly, parks illegally and throws out the tickets, etc. At first I thought there'd be some good reason for these unrespectable traits, but there never is; at the end, when she marries the other protagonist (a somewhat more likeable fellow), I felt sorry for him.

The antagonist, on the other hand, is so overdone as to be unbelievable. And I almost liked him better than the protagonist anyway.

I think Benford has good potential, and I love the physics, but this book was not enjoyable.

I would love to say that I liked this book. I certainly tried to like it.

However, the characters were one-dimensional, and seemingly defined entirely by one flaw, tic or trait. For example: the female lead smokes, but we're never told how she feels about herself smoking, why she smokes, what it feels like, why she's lighting up at that particular moment, simply that she does, in fact smoke. Not all that interesting when there's no context.

Worse: the underlying "big concept", which is primarily why I like to read science fiction, was just not that interesting. Macro-sized quantum particles could be fascinating, but his implementation of the idea was simply ho-hum.

In short, one idea, one dimensional characters, no genuine dramatic tension, no page-turning momentum, and rather a waste of money.

Buy it only if you plan to use it as a sleep aid.

You know that when the prologue is the most interesting part of a novel, what you have is a huge time waster. In ARTIFACT, Gregory Benford takes an interesting premise and does nothing of note with it. Somehow a cube-shaped artifact winds up in a three millennia old Greek tomb that the prologue tells us caused significant death and death destruction to that ancient populace. Flash forward three thousand years, and a team of archeologists uncovers the cube and analyzes it, and the same threat emerges. Now this is pretty gripping material--if handled right, but Benford takes far too long to even approach anything to involve the reader. What he does do is to take the cube and place it in the background and in the foreground puts a dopey subplot of a horny bad guy making a pass at the pretty archeologist who uncovers the cube. I found myself fast forwarding through the subplot waiting for some relevant complications. I found very little of a complicatory nature. True, Benford tosses the reader a few bones about micro black holes and particle physics, but nothing along the lines to make sense. To see how a writer can unite science premise with human complication see Alan Eckert in his masterful THE HAB THEORY. Now THERE was a book that taught me even as it entertained me. Alas, the only thing I learned from ARTIFACT was that a boring human subplot ought not be used to mask a potentially more involving science premise. Unfortunately, even here, I already knew that.

An expedition in Greece uncovers an artifact that is several thousand years old. No-one knows what it is made out of, or what it can do, only that it is quite powerful and dangerous.

The female academic discovering fights to stay involved, and gets help from her own institution as she can. Eventually, it involves spies, the military, politics, and all sorts of other people around the world, until they finally discover what it can actually do.