The Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

Posted by: Redhead on: February 14, 2014

• In: Gregory Benford | Larry Niven
• 13 Comments

The Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

published in 2012

where I got it: purchased new

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Science fiction adventure? A strange bowl shaped structure in space? Bird-like aliens that “adopt” species they come across? An alien planet that sends out confusing information? Shut up and take my money!  Right?  Not so much, as it turns out.

The Bowl of Heaven starts out as you’d expect a science fiction adventure story to start: we’ve found a planet that could be another Earth, a new home for a humanity that’s quickly outgrowing Earth. Nicknamed Glory, a large expedition is put together to sleep most of the way, and assess the situation when they reach Glory.  And they wouldn’t have awoken biologist Cliff Kammesh if it wasn’t an emergency.  The ship’s computers have found something, something they can’t explain: a star that just winked into existence.  They couldn’t see the star before, because it was hidden behind a structure nearly the size of our solar system.

Captain Redwing is awakened as well, along with biologist Beth Marble (she and Cliff have a relationship), and a handful of other crewmembers. They need to understand this giant structure, but they also need to reserve the dwindling food and air stores they have on the ship.

The structure is a gigantic bowl like structure, the “bottom” is mirrors aimed at a star, and the “sides” are all biome. There’s a magnetized hole in the bottom, and the mirrors cause ripples and disturbances in the star’s surface, and the magnetized hole pulls a jet of agitated plasma away from the star, propelling the huge machine forward through the cosmos. The scene where Beth pilots the ramscoop ship through the plasma jet absolutely blew me away, and I will forever remember it as one of the most amazing scenes I’ve ever come from across in a hard science fiction novel. Once through, and into the inside of the bowl, it would be a crime not to explore further.

A shuttle is taken down, and the humans are quickly approached by the denizens of the Bowl. Giant bird like creatures, with chromatophoric feathers and a culture built around the Bowl, built around a life where the sun quite literally, never sets.  They call themselves The Folk, and a scientist/linguist, Memor, is assigned to these strange invading creatures. She (when we first meet Memor, she’s a he, but is at the point in his life where he changes into a she. Memor is a she for the majority of the novel) captures half of them, and the other half manages to escape. Beth is the captured group, and Cliff is in the group that escapes. From this point on, the narration jumps between Beth’s group, Cliff’s group, and Memor’s point of view.   And all of this happens within the first 100 pages of the book. And then??

The super quick summary of The Bowl of Heaven boils down to: really cool aliens, boring humans.  It wasn’t a terrible book, it’s just that I expected more from it, and I expected a LOT more from these authors, in particular.  They’re gonna need more than that brilliant scene of piloting the ramscoop ship through the plasma jet to save this book.

Because once we meet Memor and the humans are split into two groups? All of that interestingness and potential for more? it came screeching to a halt for me. The story became “we’re walking, we’re walking, we’re walking. . . oh shit, aliens! we’re running! we’re running!”. Beth’s group works on escaping and contacting their ship, and Cliff’s group works on exploring, avoiding capture, and contacting their ship, all while trying to find what they can safely eat. There’s a good 300 pages of that, and not much else.

Yes, yes, I know that since this is hard scifi it’s more about the science and less about the characters, but I wish our main characters, Cliff and Beth, had been developed a little more. Cliff mostly fights with the temptation to cheat on Beth with another woman who is in his survival group. I felt like I got to know Captain Redwing, who isn’t even a main character, the most. The true main character of the book? The Bowl itself.  The Bowl of Heaven reminded me a little bit of Rendevous with Rama, with its unknowable and unfathomable aliens, and a big dumb object that becomes a character unto itself.

I wish Memor had more time on screen. I want to learn more about her culture, especially their practice of domesticating intelligent beings they come across in their dash across the universe. And speaking of their traveling bowl, where are they headed, and how and why did this journey begin? An even more pressing question is how do plants and animals evolve when the sun is always up? There are shadows in the Bowl, but there is never any nighttime. You’d like Beth and Cliff would be in biologist heaven, but no, there’s very little focus on that. Had I not looked at the list of characters at the beginning for reference, I’d have quickly forgotten that they were both biologists.

The big plotlines come to a conclusion, making The Bowl of Heaven work just fine as a stand alone. Yet this is the beginning of series, so much is left open ended. Not a spoiler, but there is some talk between characters at the end, that why should they go onto Glory, when there’s plenty of terraformed land right here with water and breatheable air? My prediction is that as this series continues, we’ll learn more about this alien culture, and either live peacefully with them in the Bowl, or fight them for it.  Or someone else will learn, because I probably won’t continue reading it.

 

Tags: aliens, science fiction