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The Collapsium |
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Author:
Wil Mccarthy
By Bantam
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $4.53
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Product Description
In this stunningly original tale, acclaimed author Wil McCarthy imagines a wondrous future in which the secrets of matter have been unlocked and death itself is but a memory. But it is also a future imperiled by a bitter rivalry between two brilliant scientists--one perhaps the greatest genius in the history of humankind; the other, its greatest monster.
The Collapsium
In a world of awesome technology, the deadly substance called collapsium has given humans all the powers and caprices--including immortality--of the gods they once worshiped. Composed of miniature black holes, collapsium allows the instantaneous transmission of information and matter--as well as humans--throughout the solar system. But while its reclusive inventor, Bruno de Towaji, next dreams of probing the farthest reaches of spacetime, Marlon Sykes, his ambitious rival in science--and in love--has built an awesome telecommunications network by constructing a ring of collapsium around the sun. It appears Sykes may be the victor--until a ruthless saboteur attacks the ring and sends it falling toward the sun. Now the two scientists must put aside personal animosity to prevent the destruction of the solar system--and every living thing within it.
Amazon.com Review
Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure. A real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot, McCarthy continually sets a very high standard for good old-fashioned space stories. In The Collapsium, McCarthy builds on a lovely novella to tell the far-future story of two scientists entrenched in a rivalry that may save, or destroy, the solar system. Tamra Lutui, the Queen of Sol, brings together the brilliant enemies in order to prevent the Ring Collapsiter, a vast ring of strange matter, from falling into the sun. So it is that Bruno de Towaji, inventor of collapsium--crystals made up of tiny black holes that can transport matter instantaneously across vast distances--must find a way to work with Marlon Sykes, who came up with the Ring to change the nature of communication forever. McCarthy makes liberal use of his extensive science knowledge, especially when he describes the nature of high-concept physics ideas like collapsium or wellstone (programmable matter!), but luckily, his literary skills are up to the task of moving the narrative along, keeping us in suspense, and creating characters who are worth reading about. His descriptions of the physical phenomena surrounding the artifacts of high-energy material manipulation are deft and fascinating: A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become--seemingly overnight--a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! Towaji and Sykes labor to save the Queendom and outwit the saboteur trying to wreck the Ring, all the while burdened by a byzantine and bureaucratic social structure with demands for party appearances, verbal sparring, and quick thinking. While those of us who aren't physics mavens might quail at some of the terms and ideas McCarthy casually uses, it's his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction's masters. --Therese Littleton
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Readable, but not great..., 2007-07-24
Decent book. The plus side is that it is readable, but there are some serious flaws as well. First of, the book starts off like a collection of short stories but when it finally settles into the main plot it is pretty good reading for a while.
Writing of a future where absolute death is almost unheard of is difficult, because there is so little to care about. As Orson Scott Card cleverly showed in The Worthing Saga, there is no greatness or heroism if nothing bad can happen to a person. So it takes careful writing to keep the world interesting in these times. And Wil is able to do that for the most part with threats to all of humanity and interesting characters.
But then there's the ending...
Very lame. Without giving too much away, a main character dies, is grieved for, and then comes back to life for a "happily ever after" ending.
Don't kill the character for impact if you are going to magically ressurect the character at the end of the book. That is lame.
P.S. One other thing - I keep seeing "hard sci-fi" bandied around in these reviews. I think that is by people who don't have a scientific background because I do and I didn't see Wil's "science" as hard. It is more akin to the relationship between "hard witchcraft" and "Harry Potter witchcraft." This is fantasy sci-fi, not hard sci-fi. It is clever and it is logical enough to carry the story forward, but it isn't based on much in the way of real science.
A good primer, 2007-01-08
Collapsium is the start of a series of novels that follow in its wake. Curiously, the opening act is actually far worse than what is to follow: "Wellstone," "Lost in Translation," and "To Crush the Moon" provide both better entertainment and better exploration of the implications of the marvelous technology that Maccarthy dreams up. So let us be clear on what Collapsium is and what it is not:
1) It IS a great appendix to reading the aforementioned novels. Besides having a scientific (sci-fi) appendix of its own that explains the (hypothetical) physics behind the technology, Collapsium is really kind of an appendix in its own right, and a decent enough reference to backgrounds of characters that are more fully developed in later novels.
2) It IS a book full of imaginative ideas. Sometimes overly so. Maccarthy's physics is solid, while his speculations on future physics span the full range of plausibility, from "maybe" to "no way!" - but all of it is imaginative, interesting, and good fun to think about.
3) It is NOT a particularly good novel in its own right. Really, the book consists of three somewhat independent and weak novellas: though ordered chronologically they do not share the coherence of ordinary chapters in a single book, and each presents an adventure of its own. The plot (or plots) are not all that engrossing, mainly because they all have a very simple "hero vs disaster" or "hero vs villain + disaster" linearity to them. And since these types of plotlines invariably end with a triumph of our hero, the intrigue is, for the most part, not there. Finally, as other reviewers have mentioned, the character development is somewhat lackluster.
The main raison d'etre for this book, as I see it, is that ideas in it have great POTENTIAL for a full-fledged development. Chief among these is not programmable matter or instant comminication afforded by the collapsiter grids, but the achievement of immorbidity. From this novel alone, it is hard to say what the author makes of it, but the promise is there.
So let me conclude with a recommendation. Skip this one and go straight for "Wellstone." If you enjoy it (which you should), but find yourself wanting details on the background of the Queendom of Sol, its historical figures, and its technological marvels, THEN read Collapsium.
Entertaining, some good ideas, but nothing spectacular, 2005-09-14
Don't get me wrong--this was a good book, I enjoyed reading it, and savored it up until the end. But apparently there are more books in this storyline, and I'm just not interested. That about sums up how I felt about this one.
For this one, I want to contrast some pros and cons point-by-point.
Pro: The characters are (mostly) interesting, and I wanted to see what happened with them. It's certainly outside my experience to come across a collapsium engineer, a madman who keeps cloned copies of his rivals to torture them, or a queen of the solar system.
Con: The characters are kind of ridiculous. Bruno is just too smart and perfect to take seriously, and the few attempts to make him human (like getting drunk at a formal dinner through technology advanced enough to perform any sort of alchemy, but not keep dinner guests from getting drunk--give me a break!) just come across as something added on after the novel was written in a weak attempt to make him human.
Pro: There are some neat technology ideas in this book, and they certainly play a part in the plot.
Con: The ideas are really nothing novel. There's nothing here that hasn't been explored, and probably better, by other fiction authors. The author's book Hacking Matter is probably more interesting from a science (or sci-fi) point of view. It's not hard to read this book and say 'Why, oh why if they had this sort of technology would they still do things this way??' If people had the kind of technology this book proposes, they wouldn't be living like they do--their world would be very different. The book tries to cover for that in several ways, playing into the queendom conceit and pushing certain things off into the world of the insane, like making the bad guy the only one who makes major biological changes to people. Why wouldn't people do this to themselves if they could? I mean, people already get tattoos, which are permanent and have no tangible benefits. People don't have a history of avoiding body modifications, and if they have an economic advantage....
Pro: The writing is pretty good, and the book was obviously edited and vetted by competent people. It was never painful to read, and many places were quite well written.
Con: The style is totally contrived, though this is not unintentional. I assume the style is based on the Queendom setting of the book, and how the author thinks people in such an environment might behave, think, and write. It mostly works, but not until you're well into the book. By the end, I really didn't notice it, but it can be awkward at times. In the end, I can appreciate it, but I'm not sure if it totally worked.
Overall, this was a pretty good sci-fi story, but not a book I'll remember a year from now.
hard sf, 2005-08-14
This truly is hard science fiction. Its good stuff. None of this Lois Mcmaster Bujold garbage, this guy actually understands what sci fi is.
Only complaint is that there was not enough action, most the plot is a psychological/scientific battle between two supergenius' about who can solve a problem the fastest and in the most ingenious fashion.
Wow! It's like living in a future full of excitement and (very) clever people! , 2005-07-16
McCarthy builds a world that continues to surprise throughout the entire book. There is enough solid and clever physics for hard science fiction fans to keep busy and enough interesting (and clever!) people to interest "people" people.
Read it!
"-"
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780553584431
ISBN: 055358443X
Label: Bantam
Manufacturer: Bantam
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 428
Publication Date: 2002-11-26
Publisher: Bantam
Release Date: 2002-11-26
Studio: Bantam |
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