Customer Reviews

Eater

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

 

 

This is the first of Benford's I've read, and I was disappointed. The idea of the intelligent black hole, while not totally novel, was fascinating, and supported by utterly convincing fact-based detail about ergospheres, magnetically controlled plasma, Alfven waves, and the Kuiper belt. But when it moves beyond his area of expertise, astrophysics and the bureaucracy of big science, the story suddenly seems sophomoric.

This is basically an old-school 1940s pulp/Trek/Independence Day style plot. I found quite a few implausibilities in the alien's history, the reaction of Earth's population to it, the politics, and the ability of scientists to outwit the US security apparatus. The first 3/4 is very slow, although it gives a good picture of what it's like to be a high pressure astronomical researcher. The characters seem cliche - the superior, cultured Brit, the spunky female astronaut. The love story is nicely mature, but still slow and kind of wooden.

The biggest fallacy and irritant in the book was it's rah-rah anthropocentrism, with good ol' American homo sapiens managing to do what thousands of other civilizations couldn't - kick the alien's [...].

There were also a few disparaging remarks about Carl Sagan, whose alien contact novel 'Contact' is light years better than this one - in my opinion the best. If you want to learn about plasmas and scientist's rivalries, read this book. If you want a convincing alien contact story, read Sagan.

well, the great one does it again. here's another example that great SF has not died. this book delves into the actions of scientists and the world against an incredible extraterrestrial threat which seems to be able to destroy the world as we know it. definately worth reading

Had this novel been the first of Benford's which I'd read, I admit I'd be pretty impressed. But knowing the works of which Benford is capable, this novel was quite a disappointment. Readers who are impressed by his examination of the scientific process may wish to look at his previous novel, Cosm, which was essentially the same thing. This novel contained two-dimensional characters, whose main duty seemed to be spewing out tiny little jokes about science and bureaucracy. Rather than coming up with an original work, Benford seems to have rehashed many of his previous novels: the probe approaching Earth in In the Ocean of Night, the examination of the possible nature of black holes in the final two novels of the Galactic Centre Cycle, the look at scientific methods and bureaucracy in Cosm--even the line, "The thing about aliens is, they're alien," had been done to death in his six-book Cycle, and was repeated here ad nauseum. From a writer of Benford's intelligence and talent, I expected much more originality and depth. This is his first work in which I was disappointed.

I realised after the first few chapters that many aspects of "Eater" are directly 'borrowed' from Fred Hoyle's classic "The Black Cloud" which was published in the 1950's. e.g. 1) Strange astronomical artifact discovered to be space beast; 2) British astronomer royal named 'Kingsley' leads team; 3) Subterfuge used to recruit members of scientific team; 4) Key character killed at end by action of space beast; 5) Unsuccessful missile attack on the space beast; 6) Others that would give the end away... The coincidences are so close that they cannot be accidental. "Eater" differs by making the creature hostile, but I preferred Hoyle's ending, even though (because?) it was philosophy rather than star-wars. One week after I read "Eater", Fred Hoyle died...Hmmmm...

A mechanism constructed around a black hole billions of years ago has been traveling across the universe gathering and banking digitized versions of intelligent life. As it approaches Earth, it demands that several thousand humans be sacrificed to its library of knowledge, including specific individuals (Hillary Clinton among them). To encourage compliance, it uses magnetic energy to pummel D.C. and to visit lightning storms upon military or scientific bases while it gobbles up satellites. Working furiously, and often at odds with the military and political figures who try to control the operation, a team of astronomers searches for a way to chase the mechanism away.

While some reviewers here have complained that the novel's central thesis isn't fresh, that didn't particularly bother me. I enjoyed Eater for a couple of reasons. First, the key characters are flawed, human, and multidimensional. They made this a more interesting story than I usually expect from hard sf--and I do mean hard, given that the discussion of astrophysics was far beyond my grasp.

Second, while science fiction written by scientists typically portrays scientists as the saviors of the human race, Benford offered insightful views of how scientists compete against each other even while working together. He shows them indulging in professional jealousies, often a bit petty, and demonstrates how scientists can engage in politics even while claiming to despise politicians.

The story's emphasis on people--their follies and foibles, their complicated relationships, their cooperation and competition--makes this novel stand out. Hard sf too often focuses on ideas and places secondary (if any) emphasis on characters. Maybe that makes good reading for people of a scientific bent, but for those of us who don't have degrees in astrophysics, it's nice to encounter a novel of hard sf in which people matter.

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The Eater is a small black hole that enters the Solar system in 2023,
and opens a conversation with the astronomers who discover it.
Hijinks ensue.

The book opens with some of the strongest writing in Benford's
career -- the three major characters come to life in prose that's
pretty near perfect. Channing Knowlton, an astronaut-turned-
astronomer who is dying of breast cancer, is particularly well-
drawn. And her husband Benjamin, a senior astronomer at Mauna
Kea, and Kingsley Dart, Britain's Astronomer Royal, once Channing's
lover and a master scientist-politician, are very fine indeed. Benford's
portrait of scientists at work is wonderful, unmatched by any other
novelist I know. Reading the first 100 pages, I got that primo creamy
rush from great writing, neat ideas and wonderful characters....

But -- when the politicians enter the story, greatness tails off to
competence (though still with flashes of the Pure Quill) -- and when
the shoot-em-up starts -- well, hell, it's still pretty good, but not
*magic*, y'know? Drama turns to melodrama, and a bold remake of
'Mankind meets a Cosmic Being' becomes just another thriller. Sigh.

But those first 115 pages -- wow. Worth the price of admission.

Overall: 3.5 stars

Happy reading!
Pete Tillman

A strange world-eating sentient alien is heading towards Earth. It's perfecting it's method of communication with mankind. It brings strange messages of destruction and hope. And it must be stopped though higher civilizations have failed. Eater provides a gripping story of a select group of individuals who take on a world-eating monster. Hard to put down.

I first started reading Benford in his collaboration with David Brin in Heart of the Comet. That book blew my mind.

This one continued the process of my own mental big bang. Benford, a brilliant physicist, continues to excel at created new and realistic views of science. In Eater, he brings a brilliant view of allies and enemies, progressions in alien viewpoints and human perspectives.

Keep up the great work, Gregory...oh, and while I'm at it....can I request a sequel to Heart of the Comet?

The novel had too many implausibles for me to suspend disbelief. Examples: Astronomers do not outwit spies. Humans do not outwit 7.5 million year old entities whose brains operate a million times faster. The rest of the world doesn't sit around and let the U.S. conduct negotiations with an alien that can destroy all of humanity. And there is no "Hawaiian chic".

The story was essentially over by page 190 (of 371). What you learn from the subsequent pages has no effect on the story's denouement. Fat books sell better than skinny books, I guess. If you're like me, by page 250 you'll be hoping for some friendly rutting among the astronomers to relieve the monotony, but your hopes will be in vain.

For good Benford, try Cosm or Timescape. For good Benford with rutting politicians thrown in as a bonus, try Shiva Descending.

Space is pretty big, so it stands to reason that intelligent life must exist somewhere Out There. Most authors who write of non-human life tend to think anthropomorphically and make the aliens look and think sort of the way that we do. Other authors have the vision to make their aliens not solid in the sense that humans are. Gregory Benford, in EATER, has chosen to make his alien an intelligent black hole that has designs on uploading the intelligence of selected members of the human race. Now there is nothing inherently unbelievable with giving an alien intelligence that has no fleshly container. Fred Hoyle in THE BLACK CLOUD posited much the same,but in Hoyle's case, the cloud was given a credible existence and motivation. Benford's thinking black hole may be reasoning, but it can't be too smart as it allows a very new species, human beings, to outwit a creature that had been gobbling up innumerable species for their brains for billions of years.
Part of the problem in maintaining the reader's interest is nothing more prosaic than Benford's irritating prose style. He often spends page after page describing an event in such convoluted stream of consciousness that the reader has difficulty understanding even on a basic level what is happening. Benford likes to pepper his pages with inside jokes and witticisms that I feel sure he sees necessary as a tension breaker. Had the tension been truly palpable, then the occasional witty remark could be justified. As for the Eater itself, Benford presents it as one who is so godlike in its omnipotence that it deigns to speak in the psuedo-literary gibberish style that is learned from eavesdropping on Earth's radio transmissions. I would think that a creature with an near infinite ability to process data would be able to reply in a style that did not stamp it as a faulty computer run amuck. I had a problem with how the creature was confronted. The hero, Kingsley Dart, soon realizes that if the Eater cannot be destroyed conventionally using nuclear devices, then maybe an electrowave pulse beam shot at its metaphorical heart, the event horizon, just might short circuit it. And of course, he is right, and humanity lives to see another day.
Ultimately, this book fails to engage the reader in that the author tries too hard to show off his vast knowledge of things astronomical but does not allow for a multi-billion year old mind to anticipate that a lowly species like humanity could turn the creature's greatest strength against it, proving yet again that pulling victory out of a magician's hat at the last moment did not work for the ancient Greeks nor does it work in the here and now.