Glorious: A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford, Larry Niven

Overview

Glorious continues the hard science fiction Bowl of Heaven series from multi-award-winning authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven…

Audacious astronauts encounter bizarre, sometimes deadly life forms, and strange, exotic, cosmic phenomena, including miniature black holes, dense fields of interstellar plasma, powerful gravity-emitters, and spectacularly massive space-based, alien-built labyrinths. Tasked with exploring this brave, new, highly dangerous world, they must also deal with their own personal triumphs and conflicts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250326126
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Series:	Bowl of Heaven , #3
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	444,412
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

GREGORY BENFORD teaches at the University of California and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is a winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, and the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In 1995 he received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experimentation, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.

Larry Niven is the award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces and fantasy including the Magic Goes Away series. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He has received the Nebula Award, five Hugos, four Locus Awards, two Ditmars, the Prometheus, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award, among other honors. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

Editorial Reviews

04/20/2020

The disappointing third space opera in the Bowl of Heaven series from hard sci-fi doyens Benford and Niven (after 2014’s Shipstar) returns to a galaxy in which extraterrestrial life-forms have created a “vast bowl built to capture and refocus a star’s own radiation” used for space-faring adventures. Instead of expanding on this imaginative premise, Benford and Niven focus on the thinly-drawn human crew of the spaceship SunSeeker, among them husband-and-wife biologist team Cliff Kammash and Beth Marble. SunSeeker’s exploration of the galaxy leads the crew to encounter a series of bizarre extraterrestrial beings, including carnivorous kangaroo-like creatures and a benevolent, many-armed alien given the distractingly cutesy nickname Twisty. Throughout, the authors introduce exciting but underdeveloped concepts—sentient plasma, miniature black holes—that casual readers will struggle to grasp. Benford and Niven also lean too heavily on genre convention: the expendable crew members used to establish the stakes will put readers in mind of the redshirts on Star Trek, and Twisty’s unconventional dialogue occasionally veers into Yoda territory (“You tired must be from journeys”). This does not live up to expectations. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Niven is a galaxy-class storyteller." —Time magazine

"Great storytelling is still alive in science fiction because of Larry Niven." —Orson Scott Card, NYT bestselling author of Ender's Game

"Niven and Benford? Of course it's great. Two grandmasters combined their talents and the result is, well, glorious. It's a proper end to an amazing trilogy." —Larry Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Arctic Gambit

"Benford and Niven have solved the Fermi Paradox! They have created fantastic, yet plausible worlds and aliens who are, at once, witty, wise, and wily…" —Dr. Don Erbschloe, Colonel USAF (ret.) and former Commander of Air Force Office of Scientific Research

"What sets Benford apart from most of the high-tech literary herd is his gift for characterization and language, his refusal to let gadgets overwhelm the people in his stories.... Benford never lets his characters become the animated cardboard cutouts that afflict too many hard science fiction stories." —San Francisco Chronicle

"[Benford is] one of today's central practitioners of hard science fiction writing." —Denver Rocky Mountain News

"Benford is a rarity: a scientist who writes with verve and insight not only about black holes and cosmic strings, but about human desires and fears." —The New York Times Book Review

"Full of ideas and often intriguing." —Kirkus Review

From the Publisher

2020-03-30
The third and presumably final installment about a hard-science space odyssey whose purpose is to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy.

Previously, our starship encountered the Bowl, a vast, steerable object that wanders space capturing and enslaving alien species to occupy its unimaginably huge living space. Having wrestled the Bowl's birdlike boss species to a standstill in the sequel, Captain Redwing and crew planted a thriving colony there. Now, the starship finally attains its original destination, Glory, a planetary system whose orbital dynamics prove artificially engineered and enormously more complex than remote surveillance indicated. The Bowl, it emerges, directed by ancient, patient alien Ice Minds, has met the Glory system's controlling intelligences before—and they are not best buds. Like its predecessors, this adventure is clotted with technical detail (what was it Twain said about never letting the facts get in the way of a good story?), nearly all of it skippable. Biologists Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash (they're an item) visit the alien planets and encounter a parade of mind-bogglingly implausible critters, some lethal, some highly intelligent, some merely ridiculous, in a narrative peppered with borrowings, often annoying, from Brian Aldiss' classic Hothouse (1962). Redwing, meanwhile, heads for a gigantic living spaceship and a meeting with Glory's weird head honcho; this offers the authors scope to write impressive exchanges wherein resourceful humans augmented by AI are not altogether overmatched.

Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.

Kirkus Reviews