I Read Books: Artifact
A Mycenean tomb in Greece produces a weird artifact at the end of the digging season. A combination of political problems and personal animosity leads to the remaining American archaeologists not informing their Greek counterparts, and instead bringing in the first metallurgist they can get their hands on. He’s actually a mathematical physicists doing calculations for the metallurgy department, but he takes the gig because he fancies the archaeologist.
Things get out of hand and they half-inch the artifact, which in their Boston lab turns out to have weird radioactive, magnetic and even gravitational properties. Worse still there may be another part, currently digging through the earth’s core to try and rejoin it.
Meanwhile with Greece getting into a shooting war with Turkey, trying to reunite them at the source becomes politically impossible, though that doesn’t stop the Greeks (quite rightly) trying to reclaim the artifact and not listening to the problems.
Benford mixes romance, lies, university internal affairs, high energy speculative physics, myth and history with near-future politics and basically succeeds.
Read This: If that mixture sounds okay
Don’t Read This: If that sort of thing sounds dull
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