Glorious

Bowl of Heaven #3

by Gregory Benford, Larry Niven

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.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Aliens, Dinosaurs, Hard Science Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2020

About the author

Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember reading adventures where a full team goes in to explore a strange new world and only a handful come out alive? Where very strange creatures with even stranger motives tease and tempt you into situations you know you shouldn't be in, but you're just TOO CURIOUS to resist?

Yeah, I love those adventures, too. A believed that they were becoming a lost art form. And maybe they are... at least in SF where they used to be so abundant. New Worlds, New Aliens! (as opposed to the much more common: New worlds, New Aliens to kill!)

Well, I'm happy to say that the old art form is back, at least for these three Bowl of Heaven novels by Gregory Binford and Larry Niven. More, I think this third book does it even better than the first two.

In the afterward, I should point out that they are not adapting the old Big Dumb Objects clause to their immense technological marvels, but Big Smart Objects. This is an adventure where we newcomer humans encounter vastly long-lived civilizations who maintain their enormous structures intelligently.

In Glorious, the system where both the Bowl and the Humans had been traveling to when they got entangled in each other's stories is now in sight. Humans make first contact (for various reasons I won't spoil) and are embroiled in both a physically awesome structure and a wildly complicated social structure featuring TONS of intelligent aliens. If I thought the amount of livable surface area in Bowl was amazing, the one in Glorious is even more amazing (and MORE interesting).

And these aliens don't deign to talk to anyone else in the universe unless they use gravimetric waves. As in, communication through a series of herded black holes, manipulated in such a way as to transmit vast distances without ever breaking the current laws of physics. This is the old-style SF, after all, where real science rules. :) :)

No spoilers, but I was glued to my page. I was just as curious as the characters on the page and I might have made all the same mistakes, too. It's always a free lunch for SOMEBODY there. Of course, that usually means that you're the meal. :)

Good stuff! Big ideas all over the place and fun all the way through!

=

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was quite a treat for me to experience this team effort on an old-fashioned, hard sci-fi space opera from authors I have been reading since my teens. Niven, now 82, marshalls his skills in storytelling and world building, and Benford, 79, contributes through his talents in physics and inventiveness on alien mindsets. The story, set a few hundred years from now, brings a human colony ship into the realm of a very advanced intelligent species and takes us through the dance of each getting to know and trust each other. The story fruitfully revisits the old trope of humans being judged on dangerousness by a galactic community of wise species in the face of our violent war-making history and rapid rise to a nuclear-powered spacefaring species in a few thousand year. The additional “crime” our species is being judged by is that of causing mass extinctions on Earth.

As with Niven’s “Ringworld” and many sequels, the alien setting of the story is an awe-inspiring system of technological mastery, in this case a pair of worlds, called Glory and Honor, linked by a massive artificial cylinder (the “Cobweb”) with myriads of diverse low-gravity ecologies within or on plates with surface areas comprising many times that of Earth’s surface. The small number of crew awake from cryo-sleep have already been humbled on the way in by the nearby collection of black-holes in an oscillator configuration, inferred to be a gravity wave communication system among similarly advanced, far-distant species in an exclusive intergalactic “Grav Wave Club.” The authors get to let their imaginations run rampant with their fictional creation of life forms and intelligent aliens, which were plausible enough for my happy engagement and wonderment. For drama, our leader, Captain Redwing, and handful of engineering and biology officers are put through the paces of many dangerous interludes on an exciting Magical Mystery Tour of encounters with these strange life forms and constructed wonders.

I found it refreshing in this era where dystopian and apocalyptic themes dominate science fiction to have some hero representatives of the human race who are humble about our historical mistakes and potential inferiority but still resilient, resolute, and bold in defense and diplomacy on behalf of a fair shake at a role in the community of intelligent species. The hoops they have to jump through just to get into a meaningful dialog the species which built and are in charge of the rules of this system make for some harrowing situations. It all starts with a long delay in the appearance of any host individual to welcome their arrival, leading to fatal encounters with local wildlife. Their eventual host, a mantis-like, three-armed creature they call Twisty, is surprisingly articulate but cagey, skills learned from long study of human history and culture in vast records transmitted during the long approach. We soon learn it is a mediator/observer connected to a hidden species and for its mission will be bringing them into contact and communication with various wise collaborator species of amazing diversity. Twisty’s condescending attitudes and complicity in allowing deaths among the human crew in association with or at the hands of these various aliens eventually makes the humans so mad they have a hard time restraining a murderous response, which might only confirm a negative judgment on human worthiness.

Between action events, our struggling human engage in a lot of philosophical and anthropological discussion with resident species, which I loved. The authors effectively explore the concept that humans might stand out among other smart species in their limited access to their own motivations, i.e. the unconscious, and thereby be dangerously deluded in their perceptions of their rationality. These aspects align with the human obsession with storytelling and creations of roles in constructed narratives or myths, including religious ones to justify selfish actions. In defense, our characters argue that the human talents in art and fast tech advancement are attributable to the same traits. Such a line of debate on our worthiness feels a bit weak when one intelligent species is able to create a full scale replica of the Chartre Cathredral before their eyes. More impressive to me is the human capacity for humor, here naturally leaning toward the dark kind. The big irony is that their being a last hope of humanity to do things right after mistakes that doomed Earth is being undermined by fears of the very capabilities and chutzpah to get as far as they have.

The book is the third in a series that includes “The Bowl of Heaven” and “Shipstar”, which I have not read. Yet I felt okay in taking this one on as a freestanding novel, given its inclusion of significant revelations on the backstory of the colony ship’s long interlude with another constructed world in the shape of a bowl and traveling by plasma jets fed from a captured star. Part of the carryover is the participation of a representative of a member of that world’s key steward species, the “Bird Folk”, oddly by means of a secret personality transplant into a spider-like animal. The hidden masters of the Cobweb system consider the Bowl world heading their way as very dangerous, so the humans at their door are suspected as being their agents. As more revelations are gleaned by our human avatars in their explorations and intersections with residents of the Cobweb and two worlds they link, they come to realize that their survival may lie in somehow mediating a bad history between the masters of two systems about a million years ago, one some kind of sessile, solid-state entities called the Ice Minds and the other some kind of fungal super-network. A tough job to pull off for sure. But maybe they can find some way of assuming a valuable role as advisor on how to stop a far-distant species with a similar aggressive primate-like ancestry in the Grav Wav Club from experiments could potentially undermine the quantum space-time fabric of the universe.

In sum, the tale is a great adventure, full of thought provoking perspectives on human nature and capabilities and projected wonders and modes of being that vastly superior minds might achieve.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Off to a great start, as the Earth starship SunSeeker pushes onward to Glory!
A lead-off quote:
A crew-woman is waking from Cold Sleep, under the care of a specialized Artilect:
"I've been awake so that you may sleep. I had to do something to occupy me. Or rather, us"
"Us?"
"All shipside Artilects coevolve."
"So you keep getting . . ."
"Smarter. Wisdom, it is harder."

Viviane is the newly-revived human. She and Capt. Redwing were Earthside inamorata before the voyage began. He is eager to renew the relationship . . .
After, he professes his love.
"Let's not rush it, yes? You may say that sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best."

Hard SF for educated adults, especially those with a deep knowledge of the authors' prior contributions. In an elegant dedication to their many past collaborators, the authors write: "Science fiction, mirroring science, thrives on collaboration."

@p. 155 (hc ed), the Human first-contact party (less one casualty) has arrived at Planet Honor via the remarkably-engineered Honor-Glory Bridge. They are checking into the newly-built human-style hostel:
"There was even a decent shower, warm and slick and soothing. So [the Glorians] did know something about humans after all. Towels, even."

The next morning, after a good breakfast, Twisty, their well-named alien host, shows off the view. A lovely alpine valley, the equal of any on Earth. A welcome respite from dingy starship corridors!
Twisty, about the mountains:
"We made them," it said.

The Human party is eager to explore Honor's scenery. A hike is organized. Then the Carniroos attack!
Twisty is playing head-games on the jumped-up primates. . .

Twisty turns out to be a test-to-destruction agent of her divided civilization. It meets a suitably nasty end, and is replaced by the more-sympathetic Anarok, captain of the great passenger sky-fish the human explorers are riding. And the great adventure continues, and gets wilder . . .

Benford and Niven pull out all the stops on this remarkable, and remarkably plausible, sketch of what the very far future of humanity might become. If we meet aliens. LOTS of aliens -- including the Diaphanous, sentient ethereals whose ancestors live in our Sun, and evolved in coronal mass ejections. A recurrent theme in the book is "Evolution is smarter than you are." A great book, a capstone to both authors' remarkable writing careers.

The book ends open-ended, and clearly has room for sequels. Sadly, Benford had a massive stroke late in 2022 (he is 82. Niven is 84). He is recovering but seems unlikely to be writing again anytime soon. I will be hoping for his full recovery. And re-reading this one down the line. Don't miss this one! I don't give out many 5-star ratings. This one may not be quite perfect, but near as dammit. Added to my 100-story Desert-Island list.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

In their Afterword Benford and Niven refer, rather tongue-in-cheek, to a centuries-long dialogue that began with Dante’s Divine Comedy, continued with Stapledon’s Star Maker, and has since been refined by the likes of Niven’s own Ringworld and Shaw’s Orbitsville.

This dialogue is the “calculated limits on a structure’s size in outer space”, which resulted in the SF trope of the Big Dumb Object, as referred to by Peter Nicholls in 1993. He was joking at the time … but little did he know how such a rich sub-genre this would become.

Benford and Niven’s take is the Big Smart Object, as both the Bowl and the Glorian double planet “must be continuously managed to be stable”. Interestingly, or perhaps ironically, it is often the inhabitants (human and alien) of these great artifacts whose behaviour can best be summed up as being ‘dumb’. So perhaps the original term should stand.

One tends to forget that Benford himself is not only a respected SF writer, but Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California in Irvine, and also contributing editor of Reason magazine. Which is in great short supply in the world at present.

Hence what a delight to read this concluding volume of the Bowl of Heaven trilogy, in which it is abundantly clear how much fun the two authors had to come up with one of the wildest rides in contemporary SF.

They comment succinctly as to how uniquely matched their different perspectives and interests are: ‘Larry likes doing aliens and their odd thoughts, as in his Known Space stories. Gregory likes the designer aspects – how does the Bowl work?’

Furthermore, on the dual process itself: “Writing is a solitary craft, but! – uniquely, science fiction encourages collaboration, echoing its core culture: science itself …” Of course, this is only one view of SF, and one that it could be argued has been superseded with its focus on hard science by a more speculative bent. Hence the current cornucopia of socio-political SF, especially in terms of climate change and gender politics.

Yet Benford and Niven are savvy enough to realise that the priorities of the genre have indeed changed as the world continues to fracture around us. They enthuse their decidedly old-fashioned Big Smart Object yarn with a great deal of cutting-edge speculative thought.

A lot of this has to be uttered by the characters, both human and alien, and here one runs the danger of having mouthpieces as opposed to fully rounded protagonists. While this was a big problem in the preceding two volumes – moreso in Shipstar for me – Benford and Niven hit a perfect balance in Glorious.

All of the characters are fully rounded, including the mind-boggling panoply of aliens. In particular, it is great to see some of the human characters like Redwing fully embrace their destiny and legacy. This is hugely satisfying for the reader, and a massive accomplishment on the part of the writers, who clearly hit their stride in this concluding volume (or is it?)

Benford and Niven also note that “A great problem with world creation is when it becomes an end in itself.” The main function of Glorious is to outdo Bowl of Heaven with an even more grandiose spectacle – in which the titular Bowl is reduced to a mere backdrop – but at the same time the human and alien stakes are that much higher, so every single action and decision has an inevitable consequence.

I suppose the problem with a book like Glorious is that a reader not steeped in the history and transformation of the genre could regard it as an anachronism. In this respect, Benford and Niven do the genre a great service by underlining by how important the SF canon is.

We need to automatically recall Ringworld and Star Maker and Rama when reading it, and the modern takes on the BDO sub-genre by writers as diverse as Iain Banks and Greg Bear. And when a trilogy like this comes along, it is an opportunity to both celebrate the past, and to mark it as a herald of an even more glorious future.

[Traveling Cloak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glorious is the third and final book in the Bowl of Heaven series by authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. This story picks up with the crew of the SunSeeker headed to Glory with the Bowl of Heaven trailing behind. The draw of this book is that the reader finally gets to see Beth, Cliff, Redwing, et al, follow through on their mission to explore the planet Glory and the planetary system to which it belongs. We spend two whole books in the Bowl, and there is a lot of excitement surrounding the final leg of this trip. It promises to have plenty of surprises and strangeness in store for readers.

And Glorious certainly delivers on those promises, and more. The authors go to great lengths to describe a world so different from ours at times that it is almost unimaginable; yet, in other ways it is very similar to Earth. The species and landscapes are varied and odd, the writing so deep and descriptive that it is easy to get lost in the imagery. That is almost what it sounds like the authors were doing: sitting back and letting their imaginations run wild. As a reader, when I see an author put so much into the book – time and energy; when I can tell they let themselves go it becomes easy to become a part of their world. That is what it has been like to experience this series, and I have really enjoyed that feeling.

Another aspect of this book (and series, overall) is the science. Sciences, I should say. Geography, geology, psychology, sociology, astronomy, physics, particle physics, archaeology. Name a word that ends in “-ology”, and this book at least touches on it. This whole series has been one big exercise in world building (in a lot of ways), which has been a lot of fun to follow. One of my favorite aspects of fantasy stories is the world building, and to bring that into a sci-fi book like this adds another dimension to an already intriguing plot makes it that much more interesting. I have a lot of admiration for much of the writing in this series.

If I could do one thing different with this book, I would add a little more action to the end. I liked the end a lot, and the way things tie up was fitting – but some more action scenes would have balanced the story out a little. This is more of an afterthought than anything, so I do not think it detracted too much for me along the way.

Glorious is a good ending to a very good series. The story was fun and interesting, and it was really thought-provoking along the way. I comp this series to Star Trek (due to the classical, episodic-feeling nature of the writing and story) meets Falling Skies (the TV show starring Noah Wyle for the it portrays human nature vs alien nature). I recommend it for fans of sci-fi.

[Michael Rhode · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very frustrating book, as the third book of a trilogy. The characters have changed, and are all now basically cardboard assholes, humans who think the universe owes them something, because they flew across it. Much less of it than we were told in the first 2 novels. And they weren't very complete characters in the first 2 novels either, but they're better than the cliches here.

By a couple of chapters in, it's obvious the authors went from memory to continue from book 2 of years ago. The 'diaphanous' aliens that were such a surprise to the crew in book 2, and a major part of the plot, are now home-grown Sol aliens who've been along the whole time. Cliff and Beth, who had agreed to stay on the bowl in book 2, especially Beth after pilot burnout, are now major parts of the defrosted crew. Very frustrating. And all the women can think about is how they're going to have children on the new planet when they get there; for that, they could have stayed on the bowl. It certainly wasn't part of their personalities in the first 2 books.

Also, Earth, previously 500 light years away, is somehow updating the artificial intelligences who help run the ship, to the point that they are actually sentient in this book, which they weren't previously. By chapter 7, one of the diaphanous remembered they were added to the ship as they were leaving the bowl, and not an Sol species. Also, Cliff and Beth's personalities have both completely changed. Editing obviously needed to be done.

The diaphanous then are returned to being referred to as a Sol species, and by page 262, Glory is only a few dozen light years from Earth, as opposed to the 500 in the original 2 books. Which explains the frequent tech update messages from Earth, but not why Redwing is so old. The actual length of the flight is unstated, but it's definitely shorter than the at least a half a millennia of the first two books.

The big reveal at the end, including the reason the Glorious didn't kill the humans, is a deux ex machina except it's not resolved, just exposed and then ignored for the last 2 chapters. Sadly, one would be happier not reading this and leaving the mystery of the Glory planet unresolved.

[Vladimir Ivanov]

С этой книгой что-то серьезно не так :(

Умом понимаю, что обоим авторам уже за восемьдесят и возраст неизбежно накладывает свой отпечаток на текст — но с первой же главы создается ощущение, что они крайне смутно помнят, что там напридумывали в прошлых частях цикла, и сочиняют чисто от балды, противореча самим себе на каждом шагу.

Персонажи, в конце прошлой книги оставшиеся жить на Полусфере, оставшейся на десятки световых лет позади, внезапно переносятся на борт "Искателя солнц". Глория описывалась как искусственная конструкция из вложенных сфер — теперь это обычная планета. Сияющие обитатели плазменного столба, которых земляне с изумлением обнаружили в прошлой книге — они теперь, оказывается, старые друзья героев, прилетели с ними на одном корабле. И такое буквально на каждой странице.

Оценку ставить не буду, т.к. прочел несколько глав и бросил. При всем огромнейшем респекте к Нивену, эту книгу ему писать уже не стоило :(

[Tim Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than I thought it would be but ...

I welcome one last shot from two authors who have done great work. I was glad to see that the ramblings of the first two books actually were headed somewhere. And I accept that the idea of the books was to explore some Big Smart Object ideas and some ways the civilization could exist there.

I don't need every book I read to have a Plucky Lesbian Genius arguing with her girlfriend, but here we have two old-fashioned 1965-era couples getting most of the human screen time. They enjoy sex more times than the reader needs, and the scenes add nothing.

Redwing is a classic Heinlein-Pournelle Leader; wants to be a hardass but has learned better. Viviane's a twerp, Beth's a ditherer. But I was glad Ashley didn't turn out to be a plot-wrecker as such a character too often is.

There are perhaps too many Redshirts. Each major scene seems to have a designated fatality.

Somehow we have ended up way closer to Earth than we were before, so our heroes are in contact with home base. To no effect, as far as I could tell.

The Glorious as a whole seem to be capable of so many wildly implausible things that it's hard to believe they need the human angle. We never did find out who makes the decisions there and how. I did like the ideas that the Twisters weren't all good at their jobs. Anoruk was a great character.

Speaking of Anoruk, who else thought of Miyazaki's Catbus as our people got shuttled off to Glory?

Finally, and maybe I missed it in Shipstar, why do the humans assume they're welcome as colonists?

Still ... I almost DNF'd this at 120 pages because the writing was sludgy. But it somehow picked up, and things started happening, and we started to see that the pieces were slowly coming together.

Good stuff, Gregory and Larry, and a much-needed throwback to Big Idea SF, but it might be time to hang up the word processors and relax.

[David Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think there's a really good book in here somewhere, wanting to get out.

I really enjoyed parts of it. It's full of big ideas and interesting situations. It's also full of fits and starts, disconnected bits, failures to engage. Failures to engage me, at any rate.

My review of the second book said it was book two of two. Here we have a third book, part three of the duology as it were. An example, in my view, of the law of diminishing returns.

The "big ideas" were interesting and enjoyable. Many of the descriptions of the things and creatures encountered by our human heroes fell short for me. At least one character who turned out important was quite underdeveloped. And that character's actions, at the key crisis point at the end of the story were... executed off-stage. A bit like a Monty Python skit: "We didn't know how to end the skit, so we had a man in a suit of armor hit somebody over the head with a rubber chicken." Did the authors write themselves into a corner, and end it this way, or was there a fourth book in the duology trilogy that they decided not to write?

In my misspent youth, Niven was perhaps my favorite author. In retrospect, my favorite works of his were all collaborations. For me, he's getting stale: past his sell-by date. Here we have characters who were born in my future who, as children (for example), collected things in coffee cans. I don't think they've made coffee cans in decades. These authors seem to have an eye to the future and a foot firmly planted in the past.

[Sharon Mensing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glorious is the third book in the “hard” science fiction Bowl of Heaven series. As a new reader of this type of science fiction, I’ve enjoyed the construction and direction of the three books where the ultimate book ‘Glorious’ brings to a conclusion many of the challenges that humans and other life forms encounter while traveling through space. The books provide a level of personal interaction and character development while challenging the reader with very interesting mind-bending concepts. The notions of sleeping through hundreds of years of earth history while traveling to another star, bio-engineering new intelligent species to accomplish needed support functions, using interstellar plasma for fusion propulsion, manipulation of gravity sources, massive unimaginable alien-built planetary systems, construction and use of miniature black holes, and physics-defying concepts like manipulating the energy level of the higgs-boson to achieve travel greater than the speed of light, are all fascinating and alien to me. The book stretches the imagination and is fascinating reading, but many of the long and detailed descriptions are repeated too often (especially where the alien personas are concerned) and detract from the overall focus of the book.

Thanks to netgalley for sharing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glorious is a very satisfying conclusion to the Bowl of Heaven trilogy. More than the other books in the series, this book explicitly explores the ideas and big questions raised throughout the series. It also introduces another new setting, the binary planet Glory, that is as original and as intriguing as the original half Dyson sphere called the Bowl of Heaven from the first books. Either setting could fill an entire series of novels and are worthy successors to the original Ringworld by co-author Larry Niven

Like many hard science fiction books, the setting and ideas tend to overwhelm and dominate the story, and the alien intelligences that are encountered are far more diverse and interesting than the human protagonists, but given the sweep of the ideas in this book it seems inevitable that the worlds of Glory and the Bowl are the real stars of the series. This series will become a classic in the hard science fiction genre.

[Tom Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Utter crap way to end a series. Everything is coming to a head and then you flip the page and boom you jump ahead a number of years and everything is hunky-dory.

[Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book turned out to be part of a series. It is very difficult to follow if you have not read the entire series as the authors assume you have done. My recommendation is that you start at the beginning and you will enjoy this book much better. It is not a stand alone novel.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook  page.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glorious by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven is the third book in the "Bowl of Heaven" trilogy. I really liked the first two books in this trilogy but this one, not so much. It starts out many years after the events in the second book. things start out pretty well but soon the story goes into mind-numbing detail about the most minor things. Some random action saves it from being a DNF. I recommend the first two books but I would not recommend this one. You can read the first two and stop and still enjoy a satisfying read.

[Chichi · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.7 stars
This is the third book in the Bowl of Heaven series by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford. James R Cheatman's narration of the audio book has a good flow and he has an impressive range to his character voicing. He definitely did a good job doing alien voices in this book, much better than in Book 2.
As for the story itself, if you are a fan of hard science fiction with a classic style and a lot of truly alien aliens, then you will enjoy this book. The world building is as good as you’d expect from these two authors. There’s even a little bit of romance in there, too. All that said, I do wish the ending had done a better job of rounding everything up but it just left me wanting more.

*I received Glorious as an advance copy for the audio book from RB Media on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Heather Bock · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the new tech and alien concepts but by the third book, Glorious, I was so frustrated with the language I couldn't wait to be done. Every other sentence was some overdone, exaggerated attempt at descriptive poetry with constant alliteration. There was so much alliteration it was all I could see anymore, distractingly irritating.

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was headed for a 5 star rating but blew itself up in the last 6 or so chapters. What happened? Did they get a 13 year old to finish the book?

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Needed another editorial pass or five. Instances where it seems like two different drafts of the same conversation both made it into the final book, one right after the other. Character names get confused. Characters not in contact with each other somehow share information. A few times, it seems like something got cut out of a conversation but then gets referenced later.

[Jim Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

At this point, after being less than impressed with the first two books in this series, I was basically going through the motions in the hopes the wrap up would save the day.

It doesn't.

Here's another large alien artifact, another jaunt across a difficult to picture landscape with random killing and eating of aliens and humans alike, and more characters we barely know coming and going. No real resolution to any of the mysteries brought up in the first two, and worse - the colonization issue settled off stage by a character briefly introduced in the third installment? As zookeepers?

I admire the authors, but they need to stop playing with large alien artifacts and get back to interesting science explored by well-developed characters.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love hard scifi, and this is pretty good. Since I missed the previous books in the series, I'm sure I didn't enjoy it as much as I might have otherwise. But the story is well constructed, and of course the science is realistic. There are aspects of the plot and dialog that seemed tricky to execute but these highly talented authors did a great job. Recommended for scifi fans, particularly if one is seeking a story with a bit of an old school feel.

Thanks very much for the review copy!!

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great conclusion to an eye-opening story.

If you thought The Bowl was strange, wait till you read about the Glory system!

Familiar characters return, new ones surface, along with many weird and wonderful aliens.

This ending to the trilogy is satisfying, and has been as enjoyable a read as the previous two books

[Jonathan Guyton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible

Did they hire a ghost writer for this? Almost unreadable. I loved the ring world and other books by both authors but I had to force my way threw this book and started skipping ahead just to keep my sanity.

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glorious by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven is a highly recommended third installment of the hard science fiction Bowl of Heaven series.

"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."

This is the final installment of a hard science fiction space opera series by science fiction masters Benford and Niven. The crew of the Sunseeker was tasked with spreading humanity throughout the galaxy, but they have encountered many extraterrestrial beings along the way and added to their crew. Included in the crew is the husband-and-wife biologist team Cliff Kammash and Beth Marble. The starship is now headed toward their original destination, Glory, a planetary system with a complex artificially engineered orbital system. Benford excels at the real scientific specifics in the narrative while Niven enjoys giving the various aliens a personality. And there are many technical details and many unique aliens.

Once you start this densely pack story, you will realize that it would behoove you to have read the first two novels in the series first so you know the background and can follow along with the action with a bit more ease. The first novel is Bowl of Heaven and the second is Shipstar. Catching up with the background I missed slowed my reading down as did the technical details. This is an exciting addition to hard science fiction, but it will take time and concentration to read.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Macmillian.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/0...

[Andrew Hindle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This trilogy was really fun to see, from two authors I enjoy and admire. The imagination was huge, the creativity and the science was brilliant. Who doesn't love a half a Dyson sphere and a big old discworld-stack space elevator between two planets?

Sadly, this story was let down by ... well, the story. An amazing setting and a lot of great ideas were put together with characters only one of whom had much resonance to me, and overall the writing was in dire need of another round of editing. It constantly pulled me out of the story and frustrated me. A few of the cases are highlighted from the Kindle here.

This amazing concept could have made a wonderful story in the style of the Rama series, and maybe that's the era in which it deserved publication in this form. Today, there's more competition - or there should be.

Even this would still have let me give it 3 or even more stars, but there was also the fact that almost every noteworthy or interesting piece of text was a quote or a straight-up lift from some other author. That would have been a worthy homage if it had been accompanied by some original lines too. That's not to say the story was plagiarised - there was tons of originality through the whole concept - but for those little gems of prose, the authors seem to have leaned entirely on their peers to provide.

The ending of this book, and thus the trilogy, also seemed extremely slapdash and almost as if they just added some connective tissue to a half-manuscript full of leftover notes and little snippets of ideas, and published it as-is. Low effort and jarring to read.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan said "Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel Timescape . . . is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades." So I took a chance on Glory, which I got from the library on line not realizing it was the third book of a trilogy - so that may have affected my impressions.

This book just wasn't for me even though it had a lot of five and four-star reviews. There were a lot of digressions that interrupted the narrative and attempts at humor, especially the frequent sexual references, fell flat for me. I'm not big on all the exotic cosmic structures and acid-trip-like alien creatures, but a lot may have gone over my head. The authors obviously have a lot of astrophysical and evolutionary knowledge that I may have appreciated more had the writing style not been so tedious. The happy ending felt as much like the authors had gotten tired or hit a deadline, and given that I didn't bond particularly with any of the protagonists, I was mostly glad to be finished.

Still, larger sections of the book were engaging, and I often finished a session feeling as if I had been miles away, the reason I (and probably everyone else here) love to read.

But - I'm not giving up on this author. A short story of Benford's (from the Dozois book mentioned above) was clever, fast paced, funny and engaging. Apple's iBooks had Timescape for a mere $5.99 so I sprung for that and put it on my to read list - I probably should have done that in the first place!

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larry Niven (alone and in his various collaborations) sure does do 'sense of wonder' well. Ringworld, Integral Trees, and now the Bowl of Heaven and the dual locked world and the connecting cobweb of Glorious, in this, the third volume of the Bowl of Heaven Trilogy.
Over the years I think Niven has moved more and more to a sort of shorthand, expecting his readers to follow along (and whilst this book is a collaboration with Gregory Benford you can still see Niven's fingerprints.) I'm pretty sure that would make new readers struggle with the amount of information that the authors provide, and to be fair to them they have a hell of a lot of information to give. I do believe they avoid the worst pitfalls of “I've suffered through a lot of research to get these incredible structures right, now you should too” bu8t sometimes it's a close run thing.
So, outside of the huge world constructs imagined by the authors the book does ask questions about what a truly stable society would look like, and what the members of that society would do when faced with immature apes running round the Universe and in their sandpit. There is a tendency to travelogue, but honestly you can't hold that against the authors when they have such a great tourist attraction to describe.
I enjoyed the book, make no mistake this is not a quick and easy beach read, but it will reward your time if you let it. If you like Niven's work it still qualifies as a must read however much you miss 'Known Space'. This still satisfies.

[Silent Disco · Rating 1 out of 5]

stopped reading after chapter 1 when i could no longer ignore continuity mistakes. i get that 2 authors (both no longer spring chickens to boot) working on a novel together might be prone to miscommunication with one another regarding specific plot or character details but isn't that what editors are for?

in the first novel, i simply hand-waved it away just like i do when an older relative confuses me with a sibling. i get what they are saying or at least attempting to.

in the second novel, it became really distracting but blamed myself for being too anal.

in this final novel, not only are there continuity mistakes but complete retcon's from the previous 2 novels. maybe i wouldn't have paid attention if i didn't have all 3 books sitting in front of me but it got to the point where i thought i was going mad and thinking;

"wait a minute, so-and-so was with this group were they not? let me check in the previous novel... yup they were."
or
"wait a minute, so-and-so was said to have to done this but now they're doing this... am i misremembering from the last book? opens previous novel, nope! they said right here one thing but 6 years later in a different novel they're doing something opposite!"

there might be some good ideas in these 3 books but where there's smoke there's fire and there was smoke already in the first quarter of novel #1.

i'm tempted to go back and change my ratings for the other novels but i'm gonna sleep on it...

[Dennis Hastings · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been a fan of both authors for years, but I have to say.... the book was a struggle to read. There were a lot of sentences that were grammatically incorrect. The larger picture, of course, was astounding and interesting, but it seemed like they really needed a better editor. But, even beyond that, a lot of sentences were just 'clunky', not what one would expect from two writers that have produced far more readable material. On page 380, Cliff says "It's a altering audience that's studying us." This kind of thing doesn't happen on every page, but I gave up counting them.

Be forewarned, as well, that this isn't really a 'stand alone' book. You really needed to read the entire trilogy to understand what they were talking about a lot of times. Talking about 'the Diaphonous' threw me for a loop for a while, but they eventually clued you in enough that you could understand they were plasma entities, but it took a while. In conclusion I'd have to say, simply, that they just tried to cram too much stuff into this book... maybe all of them.

[Amber Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing last book of the series. It's like they didn't know how to end it. Warning sign was when I was halfway through the book and nothing was really happening. It started off good just fumbled the ending. Hard.

Also some sentences didn't make any sense and they had 2 different characters with the same name(tbf one used to be called a name before and they changed names later but then the introduced another character with the same name later). Some plot points didnt lead anywhere. Like Beth was mad at Cliff for having sex with a different character in a previous book and that was dropped but they introduce another character that Beth kept saying how she didn't like him but was interested in and again that plot was dropped but they wrote in how much she didn't like him a decent amount of times.

[David Kanevsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tedious

I think back on a Niven story about a Kzin safari to earth. He told a fascinating story in very few pages. It was a fantastic conclusion to a collaboration. I finished this just to be done with it. Think “ War and Peace” meets Finnegan’s Wake. I have a physics degree, and I do not know how the lay person could wade through it. My wife is a big Niven fan, but she would have very quickly abandoned it. I did like the evolved dinosaurs, and the premise of the extinction event. However, very large birds would need elephant legs. Bone strength increases as a square, of a circular cross section, but volume as a cube. So a 80 foot Gulliver could never resemble the small counterparts. The physics of critter size comes into play.