I Read Books: Eater

Eater

Amy Major, a junior astronomer at the observatory in Hawaii, discovers a strange double gamma ray burst. Despite the best efforts of Benford, the author, she drops back to becoming a secondary character. Instead we follow Benjamin Knowlton, a senior astronomer, his wife former astronaut Channing who has terminal cancer, and Kingsley Dart, Astronomer Royal, who is as at home with diplomacy, politics* and the security services as with the astronomy, a formal rival of Benjamin and lover of Channing.

The gamma ray bursts turn out to be from a singularity, which is dubbed The Eater Of All Things, and then communicates with them, opening with “I desire converse” a somewhat self evident point though perhaps one that needs saying between interstellar cultures. It demands data, and especially uploaded human minds, though this has a tendency to kill people. A confrontation ensues.

There should probably be an Unhappy Eater joke here but I can't make it work.

Read This: For a hard science fiction, slightly weird thriller
Don’t Read This: If diagrams of magnetic fields in a book turn you off, even if they are relevant to plot, character and mood

* Kingsley notes that his politics used to be “infrared” until it became clear the left was truly dead, a slightly odd note in a novel that relies on generously funded public space science.