Tides of Light [Paperback]

Gregory Benford (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Bantam Books (1994)
• ASIN: B0012PPEWG
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,552,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big concept science fiction, March 24, 2000

By 

Don Roberts (Brisbane) - See all my reviews

This review is from: TIDES OF LIGHT (Mass Market Paperback)

The "Great Sky River" series eschews the traditional science fiction device of portraying human beings as creatures apparently inferior to greater alien intelligences, yet having some indefinable superiority. How many stories, particularly as found in "Analog", have you read where humanity or an intrepid human explorer tricks superior (intellectually speaking) aliens by some sort of street smarts or idiosyncratic human trait ? Don't go looking for that smugness here. Fifty years ago John W Campbell challenged his writers to "show him a creature that thinks as well as a man only differently", but Benford has demolished the idea of mere equality in intellectual power between humans and aliens. The mechs and cyborg intelligences in this series are drawn as well as non-human aliens can be, their motivations and capabilities (as well as thought processes) are described without lapsing into merely "jazzing up" human characteristics. Benford's aliens are aliens in mind as well as physique and no reader can fathom their true nature. Benford's humans are hunter-gathers, appropriating technologies and materials they can not create themselves. William Tenn's description of humans as " rats in the walls" is carried to an extreme in "Tides of Light". Family Bishop merely dodges incomprehensible aliens and forces before fortune steers them to the next instalment. Benford has made an elegiac vision of the future, incorporating grandeur like Arthur C Clarke in "The City and The Stars" with a mysterious plot. The aliens are ALIEN and the humans are so different in physical nature amd cultural millieu as to be almost unbelievable. Strongly recommended.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Physics Like You've Never Seen It, September 9, 2005

By 

Arthur P. Smith (Selden, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tides of Light (Galactic Center) (Mass Market Paperback)

Author Benford is a professional physicist, and it shows perhaps the most in this fourth novel of the galactic center series. The others: "In the Ocean of Night" (1977), "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), "Great Sky River" (1987), "Furious Gulf" (1994), and "Sailing Bright Eternity" (1995) also rely on his scientific background and poetic language, but "Tides of Light" is the one where he manages to put his hero on a classic free-fall trajectory through the center of a planet, a situation imagined in richer detail than you've ever seen it before.

The novels are grouped in two's - the third, "Great Sky River", introduces us to Killeen Bishop and his clan, human scavengers in the dominant central galactic machine civilization some 30,000 years in the future. "Tides of Light" continues the story of Killeen, now captain of the Bishop clan, landing on a new planet with fascinating new alien life-forms imagined in realistic physical and mental detail. These mechanically augmented myriapodia, large many-legged burrowing insect-like creatures, skilfully manipulate the most exotic physical element in the series: a planet-sized cosmic string. The myriapodia use their cosmic string to burrow through entire planets, extracting the metal-rich cores to weave artificial structures on the scale of entire solar systems.

Part of the fascination of the story is the state of the humans here - good at surviving, but fearfully low in skills and abilities, and filled with knowledge of decline from a much more prosperous state. Fighting not just the myriapodia and the machines, but fellow humans led by a despotic leader, Benford manages to couple exciting action with insights into human nature, singly and in groups. Sometimes the physics seems stretched a bit - how exactly would a planetary surface and atmosphere remain livable while alien beings repeatedly removed large chunks of the core? But the breadth of Benford's scientifically plausible imagination in these novels is amazing in itself; read these novels to gain a perspective on life in the universe and what a sufficiently advanced civilization might do with a galaxy such as our own.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highest-ranking Sci-Fi, February 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tides of Light (Bantam Spectra Book) (Hardcover)

Gregory Benford is one of the few authors who don't betray science in their science-fiction. No Star Wars or Star Trek-like anthropocentrist grotesqueries in his Galactic Centre saga : the human "heroes", led and pushed rather than self-guided through our ruthless Milky Way, are little more than feral hunter-gatherers confronted to all-emcompassing alien plots. And this, even as they are routinely described as using technologies far beyond any cyberpunk gizmo ; in fact, Benford's complex and consistent characters face mind-staggering challenges, their own cultural inheritance being one amongst many. Even the classical galactic-scale plots found in Dune or the Foundation series are utterly reduced to naught compared with the (very) long-term projects of the past and present intelligences competing in Benford's universe. Now go and read this book, along with the five others in the series !