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Picoverse
A hard science fiction novel by the scientist-author of Quad World journeys into a strange world, created by deliberately tearing apart the fabric of space-time, that is one million-millionth the size of our own universe.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2002
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October 30, 2014
‘In the early twenty-first century, a team of scientists has done the impossible – ripped apart the fabric of space-time and created a brand new universe… one million-millionth the size of our own. Now they’re going to see where it takes them.
PICOVERSE
A big bang of and adventure’
Blurb from the Ace 2003 paperback edition.
Despite a cover filled with the usual plaudits and glowing praise from various quarters, Metzger’s novel of universe creation and alternate worlds ends up being a bit of a mess.
If one could imagine a story by Robert Reed being re-written by Gregory Benford then one might conceivably wind up with this.
Katie McGuire and Jack Preston are working alongside Professor Horst on a device called the Sonomak – a central gizmo into which forty-eight miniature particle accelerators are aimed. Horst is desperate for further funding for his research which is ostensibly aimed at creating nuclear fusion. However, at a demonstration, Horst decides to go for broke and runs all forty-eight accelerators. The resulting chaos, recorded on video, shows not only that the equipment has tied itself into a Carrick knot, but that odd things have happened on a subatomic level.
Horst is then approached by the mysterious Mr Quinn and a woman calling herself Alexandra Mitchell. These two are in fact immortal entities from the universe of The Makers; the beings who created our universe.
Meanwhile, Katie’s seemingly brilliant but autistic son Anthony seems oddly aware of the research experiment, which is an attempt by the immortal agents of the Makers to create a universe of their own and escape their masters.
So where does it all go wrong? The science, it has to be said, cannot be faulted. Several critics have praised the science. Gregory Benford, of all people, has provided a glowing review, from which one can only deduce that either Metzger is one of Benford’s pen-names or he has Benford’s children locked away with some sort of bomb and a digital timer.
The characterisation is very bad, and the motivation of the characters gets either so complex or so basic you want to shoot them.
When a new universe (or a picoverse) is created it is a duplicate of ours, but a lot smaller. Thus, in the first picoverse (where time moves much faster than ours) there was a duplicate Anthony who somehow made himself immortal, and then went insane. He calls himself Alpha.
Alpha then kidnaps the original Anthony and traps him in yet another universe. His mother gets such a maternal rage on that she is willing to kill billions of people to rescue her son. Metzger does not question the morality of this.
In the second picoverse, Alexandra (or one of them. It gets difficult keeping score) enlists the help of Stalin and creates a Soviet Communist world. Metzger thinks that the way to make us see the evils of communism is to show them as a people obsessed with ugly architecture, boots and bombing people. It’s very much a shallow one-sided debate. Like Benford’s woeful ‘Artefact’, one really shouldn’t waste a lot of time criticising the shallowness of this book, and one wouldn’t, had this not been nominated for awards.
Later, our heroes board an asteroid shuttle containing a functioning biosphere peopled by Neanderthals (why is not made clear). Initially the travellers discover that the Neanderthals are vicious and aggressive cannibals, but soon after we are expected to believe that these particular specimens are highly evolved creatures, far superior to homo sapiens. Two of the Neanderthals turn out to be alternate versions of Anthony, one of whom is the genetically re-engineered Alpha.
The denouement (just before which our amnesiac hero Jack remembers that he is an immortal from another universe) is sadly, just as confusing.
To be fair to Metzger, the scientific elements are handled in an exemplary fashion. This could have been an excellent piece of work had not the author attempted to combine the disparate elements of extra-universal superbeings and multiple copies of far too many central characters. This, coupled with the bafflingly swift changes of scene conspires to produce a work which annoys rather than excites.
One can only conclude that Metzger bit off rather more than he could chew. No doubt, in another smaller universe somewhere, a very good version of this novel is a best-seller.
PICOVERSE
A big bang of and adventure’
Blurb from the Ace 2003 paperback edition.
Despite a cover filled with the usual plaudits and glowing praise from various quarters, Metzger’s novel of universe creation and alternate worlds ends up being a bit of a mess.
If one could imagine a story by Robert Reed being re-written by Gregory Benford then one might conceivably wind up with this.
Katie McGuire and Jack Preston are working alongside Professor Horst on a device called the Sonomak – a central gizmo into which forty-eight miniature particle accelerators are aimed. Horst is desperate for further funding for his research which is ostensibly aimed at creating nuclear fusion. However, at a demonstration, Horst decides to go for broke and runs all forty-eight accelerators. The resulting chaos, recorded on video, shows not only that the equipment has tied itself into a Carrick knot, but that odd things have happened on a subatomic level.
Horst is then approached by the mysterious Mr Quinn and a woman calling herself Alexandra Mitchell. These two are in fact immortal entities from the universe of The Makers; the beings who created our universe.
Meanwhile, Katie’s seemingly brilliant but autistic son Anthony seems oddly aware of the research experiment, which is an attempt by the immortal agents of the Makers to create a universe of their own and escape their masters.
So where does it all go wrong? The science, it has to be said, cannot be faulted. Several critics have praised the science. Gregory Benford, of all people, has provided a glowing review, from which one can only deduce that either Metzger is one of Benford’s pen-names or he has Benford’s children locked away with some sort of bomb and a digital timer.
The characterisation is very bad, and the motivation of the characters gets either so complex or so basic you want to shoot them.
When a new universe (or a picoverse) is created it is a duplicate of ours, but a lot smaller. Thus, in the first picoverse (where time moves much faster than ours) there was a duplicate Anthony who somehow made himself immortal, and then went insane. He calls himself Alpha.
Alpha then kidnaps the original Anthony and traps him in yet another universe. His mother gets such a maternal rage on that she is willing to kill billions of people to rescue her son. Metzger does not question the morality of this.
In the second picoverse, Alexandra (or one of them. It gets difficult keeping score) enlists the help of Stalin and creates a Soviet Communist world. Metzger thinks that the way to make us see the evils of communism is to show them as a people obsessed with ugly architecture, boots and bombing people. It’s very much a shallow one-sided debate. Like Benford’s woeful ‘Artefact’, one really shouldn’t waste a lot of time criticising the shallowness of this book, and one wouldn’t, had this not been nominated for awards.
Later, our heroes board an asteroid shuttle containing a functioning biosphere peopled by Neanderthals (why is not made clear). Initially the travellers discover that the Neanderthals are vicious and aggressive cannibals, but soon after we are expected to believe that these particular specimens are highly evolved creatures, far superior to homo sapiens. Two of the Neanderthals turn out to be alternate versions of Anthony, one of whom is the genetically re-engineered Alpha.
The denouement (just before which our amnesiac hero Jack remembers that he is an immortal from another universe) is sadly, just as confusing.
To be fair to Metzger, the scientific elements are handled in an exemplary fashion. This could have been an excellent piece of work had not the author attempted to combine the disparate elements of extra-universal superbeings and multiple copies of far too many central characters. This, coupled with the bafflingly swift changes of scene conspires to produce a work which annoys rather than excites.
One can only conclude that Metzger bit off rather more than he could chew. No doubt, in another smaller universe somewhere, a very good version of this novel is a best-seller.
March 31, 2022
When the funding for a fusion electricity project looks like drying up, the lead scientist decides unilaterally to run it at its maximum power - despite some simulations showing the potential for energy gradients not seen since the Big Bang. The scientist, Horst, and his ex-wife Dr. Katie McGuire, and two assistants are thrown into a new Universe, a trillionth the size of the one they left, when the energy ripped space-time. This event reveals that the Earth they once inhabited had already been infiltrated by beings from a different Universe who wanted to use the Sonomak reactor for their own inscrutable purposes - later revealed to be a return to a different Universe (or picoverse) from which all the other Universes were created by godlike and mysterious Makers. Katie and her partner/assistant Jack, and her strangely talented son are caught up in an alien experiment that has been running across multiple universes for billions of years and may decide whether humanity is wiped retrospectively from existence. Robert A. Metzger has written a supercharged hard science fiction novel which, while explicable for most of the book, lost me in places. Well worth the brain strain however!
October 1, 2022
review of
Robert A. Metzger's Picoverse
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 29 - October 1, 2022
For no particularly good reason I expected this to be very dry hard-sci-fi, wch wd've been fine w/ me. Instead, it was quite a fantastic joy-ride & I enjoyed it for that. According to one reviewer quoted on the inside: ""With Picoverse, Bob Metzger takes his rightful place in the hard-SF pantheon. He's the equal of Clarke, Benford, Forward, and Brin["]" It's been so long since I've read Clarke (almost 50 yrs now), & I still don't know Benford or Brin's work that well (or Forward's at all), that I don't know if I agree w/ the reviewer or not.
The page that I'll call "minus ii" provides a "POWERS OF TEN" list in wch we're told that "pico" = 0.000000000001 = 10 to the minus-12th. It's the next power of ten in decreasing size after NANO & followed by FEMTO. The plot revolves around a lab experiment w/ enormous potential attended by enormous danger.
"Katie smiled.
"Hydrodynamic/kinetic mix. It was a tricky approach, but the only one that had the slightest chance of modeling what was occurring in the heart of the Sonomak. The physics describing high-speed liquid turbulent flow and ultra-hot plasmas were still poorly understood, nearly impossible to model, and when mixed together, turned into a mathematical nightmare beyond belief.
"Impossible.
"Couldn't be modeled.
"So chaotic, so intrinsically nonlinear, that the system just couldn't be understood.
"At least that was what the experts insisted—all those wizened old white men, with worn leather belts cinched over their potbellies. Can't do it, girl. No one can do it, girl.
"This girl would prove them wrong." - pp 4-5
It appears that Katie's young son is an Aspie.
"Miss Alice had been working with Anthony for almost three weeks now. Katie doubted that Miss Alice would break the four-week barrier, not after what happened two days ago, when Anthony had set up a convoluted array of aluminum foil and lightbulbs, the contraption generating enough focused heat to ignite the kitchen curtains.
"911 was on speed dial.
"He was a brilliant little boy, but could not quite connect with the world, had no concept of the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Katie sighed. People skills were an alien concept to Anthony." - p 7
The time presented, while it cd be roughly the present tense, has an alternate presidential history.
"What is wrong with the presidents of this country? Horst wanted to shout. Clinton forced to resign in '97, Gore killed in '99 after a visit to our troops in Cairo, where a wayward SAM took out Air Force One, with both those events opening the way for Vice President Marie Meyer from Iowa to fill the power vacuum. If it didn't involve corn or cows she was way out of her depth. She didn't know plasma physics from pork bellies. But Americans loved the woman, had actually elected her twice after she had finished out Gore's term." - p 11
Horst & Katie's research funding is about to be taken away from them - leaving Horst to consider getting covert military funding instead, something he's loathe to do but it's his last resort if he's to continue the work he's dedicated to.
"There was only one other source of money that he could possibly tap into. Images of an orbital Sonomak powering up a gamma ray laser flashed through his head. He did not like it—not one little bit. He was not opposed to getting into the covert weapons business. The problem was the way those people operated. Breakthroughs were instantly classified" - p 13
The project is losing its funding b/c the money is being reallocated elsewhere & Horst has a hatred for his competitors.
""ITER," Horst said in a whisper, slowly shaking his head, feeling the rage begin to build. "Goddamned Malaysians!" It was their fault. With more money than brains, willing to pay for more than half of the cost of the project, operating under the belief that if they had the world's tallest building, the fastest rail system, the largest database of indecipherable alien noise, the biggest supercomputer, and now the world's most expensive pressure cooker, that all of those things would somehow make them a First World nation.
"They were savages.
"They prayed to snakes and poked knitting needles through their faces to prove their oneness with God. Imbeciles. "Goddamned imbeciles!"" - p 14
Horst is presented early on as, ahem, not very likeable.
One of the technicians on the project, Beong Kim, is very dedicated to performing his job as best he can.
"As he felt the equipment, his third eye, ever vigilant, continued to suck down photons, converting light to electrons, digitizing, sampling, compressing, and then uplinking the data to Low Earth orbit and the nearest Teledesic satellite. Bounced among the 240 satellites of the system, the data spanned the globe within a few milliseconds, downlinked to Taejon, Korea, and to the one-meter dish perched atop Sangbom Kim's roof." - p 16
"he could see the Sonomak.
"Beautiful.
"A two-meter-diameter vanadium alloyed stainless steel sphere, with forty-eight Pocket Acclerators protruding from it, sat in the center of the lab, draped in cabling and surrounded by rack after rack of electronics. It was a work of art, an elegant piece of physics, an instrument to reveal the truth." - p 19
Alas, it's also an accident waiting to happen.
"It was the spherical chamber of the Sonomak itself that held all her attention.
"At first she thought it had been twisted, somehow flowed. But that was not quite right. It was distorted. What had been a nearly perfect sphere of stainless steel had been elongated, practically turned into a tube, and then torn in half and retied back together in a complicated knot." - p 32
""As you imagined, manipulating Wittkowski into pushing his Sonomak to the breaking point was easy. He was more than willing to destroy it to show me what it was capable of." Quinn smiled. So damn easy, he thought. They were all such children. "We had a full analysis team there within two hours of the explosion. At the mention of "possible radiation," the locals were only too happy to relinquish jurisdiction." - p 33
"But that was just as well. The falsified report she would send back to the Makers, detailing why these animals were still far away from manipulating space-time, would be all the more believable after the explosion. She would make her escape long before the Makers even suspected what she'd been doing on this world." - p 34
Yep, there're extraterrestrials & immortals & such-like in the mix - but it's really the children who're the future, eh?
"She watched Anthony coloring, tongue sticking out between his lips as he concentrated. Katie fluttered her eyelids and the image zoomed in on Anthony. So focused, she thought. Too focused. Ever since the Sonomak had been splattered across the lab, there had been a change in Anthony. Not so outgoing, not so wild, and certainly not as mischievous. He'd become a serious little boy.
"Katie was worried.
"And then there was the business of the carrick knot. Horst thought she was crazy, that she had imagined that Anthony had made the knot earlier in the day, and that the shock of the explosion, of the destruction of piece of equipment that they'd spent years building, had confused her memory." - pp 41-42
So, of course, the Sonomak loses its original funding & turns into a top secret military project instead.
"This is why we will be funding your research," - p 46
"an intricate network of discrete knots, all neatly snugged together and interlocked like the patterns in a Penrose tile. She looked more carefully, and realized just what those knots were.
"Carrick knots.
""Note the scale," said Jack.
"Katie looked at the bottom of the photo were a large white bar denoted a spacing of one micrometer—one ten-thousandth of a centimeter." - p 47
"Jack focused on Horst, "What you do not understand, but Dr. McGuire has quickly grasped, is that a similarity exists between how our universe was formed and what has happened to the Sonomak."" - p 48
Jack & Katie & Horst have Alexandra & Quinn to cope w/ - & they're learning just how formidable they are as enemies.
""Quinn lives in a world dominated by fear. Left to his own biology, he would have been a rotting corpse sometime in the latter part of the sixth century. He continues to live only because it is my wish, and that hold over him is far more powerful than mere loyalty. And then we come to the professor. His soul is even easier to own. He wants fame and believes that this project will give him just that. He is greedy."" - pp 80-81
Of course, it's always a plus for me if a SF novel stimulates me to think of something a bit beyond the pale.
""What does infinitely farther mean?" asked Jack.
"Anthony squinted and pursed his lips. "Very, very far," he said. "A place so far that it cannot be reached by geometry."" - p 90
""It could not be explained by geometry," Jack whispered, repeating what Anthony had said only moments before." - p 91
Well, not exactly. Anthony sd: "it cannot be reached by geometry." & Jack partially echoes that as "It could not be explained by geometry". [emboldening from the reviewer] What if Anthony meant "reached" literally? Does geometry reach anything? &, if so, how?
The Sonomak has created a miniature spin-off of the galaxy in wch it originates. This explains the title of the bk wch finally appears on p 97.
""We have lost contact with the picoverse, and I believe that you two can help us reestablish contact.""
The scientists gradually discover things about the picoverse.
""The high-speed cameras showed that we were getting a sunrise every tenth second," said Alexandra. "Time is flowing 967 thousand times faster in the picoverse. One hour in our universe is equivalent to nearly 110 years in the picoverse."" - pp 101-102
There's a boy in the picoverse that Anthony had been drawing predictively.
""The boy remained stationary for exactly twenty-four hours in our time after we first saw him—2,640 years in the picoverse. Then this is what happened."
"The clock in the corner slowed, the seconds ticking by now in real time.
"The boy slowly stood, took several steps forward and then opened his mouth. His lips moved, but nothing could be heard. However, above his head in what looked like glowing neon, hovered some words. Bring me Dr. Catherine McGuire and Dr. Jack Preston, read the words. Then everything went black." - p 103
After this demand, communication was cut off.
Katie & Jack had been kept away from the new secret military research until THE BOY called for them.
"As amazing as the cone was, it was Horst that captured Jack's attention. The man looked like a scarecrow, his clothes hanging on him, his belt cinched tight around his waist, nearly a foot of the black leather hanging down from a pant loop. As baggy as his clothes were, the skin on his face seemed even baggier, hanging in folds, the waddle under his neck looking like something that belonged to a turkey. His skin was yellow and his hairline had receded several inches. There were scabs and liver spots on his forehead.
"Jack imagined that this must be what Horst's father looked like.
""We did it," said Horst. His voice sounded flat and dry. He waved a hand in the direction of the cone. "We built a picoverse."" - p 104
Well before you can say Jumpin' Jehosephat in every language known & unknown throughout human history there're multiple picoverses & the characters are stuck in one.
""In order to help acclimate you to your new world, I have been requested to explain some basic facts of existence to you," said Soloyov. "The date is April 16, 1936. You are located five miles east of Marietta, Georgia, in the Eastern Republic of Soviet America. This universe and yours share a common history until June 13, 1925, at which point it was our good fortune to find ourselves in our own universe, in a world that will never be dominated by the United States of America and the capitalist exploiters who raped the planet in your universe."" - p 138
Jack & Katie are assisted in escaping Soloyov's clutches & find themselves in the part of the USA that hasn't been absorbed by the Soviet America yet.
""Think I'm crazy?"
""No," said Jack. He'd learned a great deal about Colonel Patton in the last five days of travel, not the least of which was that the man believed in reincarnation and was certain that he'd fought in every war of consequence for the last five thousand years." - p 159
By this point I'd left behind my expectations of a completely dry hard SF novel & had adjusted to there being one wild plot jump after another. Famous historical figures repurposed for an alternate universe & particle weaponry. Why not?
"But on this Earth, a desperate U.S. government had poured enough money into Tesla's projects to make them a reality. And here, Tesla had received help from two unlikely sources. The first was a Cubist painter named Juan Gris. Of some small fame back in what Jack thought of as the real world, the contemporary of Picasso had been the most mathematically oriented of the Cubists. And the second person helping Tesla was a boy, an orphan, found working on a big plantation south of Denver—Anthony Wittkowski. These three had not only invented particle beam weapons, but built radar systems and implemented laser systems that could vaporize the best Soviet armor." - p 160
Yes, out boy Anthony has grown up fast in this new world & he's about to be reunited w/ his mom after over a decade of separation.
Waddaya know? I didn't make a single review note-to-self over the next 172pp, the plot just whipped me right along. &, then? I only made one more selection:
"Usually it was so simple, the future so obvious. Intelligence was typically an evolutionary dead end. Like a spark fanned to a roaring fire, unless controlled and tempered, the outcome was almost always total conflagration. Such intelligence needed active intervention to save them from themselves, either allowing time for the species to evolve to the point of some degree of self-control, or allowing the world to spawn another race, giving another species a chance to make the leap." - p 332
Is that similar to what's happening now? These days, I feel like the sensitive free-thinking individualists are being destroyed by the pressure to be absorbed into the hive. Homogeneity replaces intelligence w/ 'safety' & it's all engineered by an oligarchy that has no use for most humans as anything but slaves.
Robert A. Metzger's Picoverse
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 29 - October 1, 2022
For no particularly good reason I expected this to be very dry hard-sci-fi, wch wd've been fine w/ me. Instead, it was quite a fantastic joy-ride & I enjoyed it for that. According to one reviewer quoted on the inside: ""With Picoverse, Bob Metzger takes his rightful place in the hard-SF pantheon. He's the equal of Clarke, Benford, Forward, and Brin["]" It's been so long since I've read Clarke (almost 50 yrs now), & I still don't know Benford or Brin's work that well (or Forward's at all), that I don't know if I agree w/ the reviewer or not.
The page that I'll call "minus ii" provides a "POWERS OF TEN" list in wch we're told that "pico" = 0.000000000001 = 10 to the minus-12th. It's the next power of ten in decreasing size after NANO & followed by FEMTO. The plot revolves around a lab experiment w/ enormous potential attended by enormous danger.
"Katie smiled.
"Hydrodynamic/kinetic mix. It was a tricky approach, but the only one that had the slightest chance of modeling what was occurring in the heart of the Sonomak. The physics describing high-speed liquid turbulent flow and ultra-hot plasmas were still poorly understood, nearly impossible to model, and when mixed together, turned into a mathematical nightmare beyond belief.
"Impossible.
"Couldn't be modeled.
"So chaotic, so intrinsically nonlinear, that the system just couldn't be understood.
"At least that was what the experts insisted—all those wizened old white men, with worn leather belts cinched over their potbellies. Can't do it, girl. No one can do it, girl.
"This girl would prove them wrong." - pp 4-5
It appears that Katie's young son is an Aspie.
"Miss Alice had been working with Anthony for almost three weeks now. Katie doubted that Miss Alice would break the four-week barrier, not after what happened two days ago, when Anthony had set up a convoluted array of aluminum foil and lightbulbs, the contraption generating enough focused heat to ignite the kitchen curtains.
"911 was on speed dial.
"He was a brilliant little boy, but could not quite connect with the world, had no concept of the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Katie sighed. People skills were an alien concept to Anthony." - p 7
The time presented, while it cd be roughly the present tense, has an alternate presidential history.
"What is wrong with the presidents of this country? Horst wanted to shout. Clinton forced to resign in '97, Gore killed in '99 after a visit to our troops in Cairo, where a wayward SAM took out Air Force One, with both those events opening the way for Vice President Marie Meyer from Iowa to fill the power vacuum. If it didn't involve corn or cows she was way out of her depth. She didn't know plasma physics from pork bellies. But Americans loved the woman, had actually elected her twice after she had finished out Gore's term." - p 11
Horst & Katie's research funding is about to be taken away from them - leaving Horst to consider getting covert military funding instead, something he's loathe to do but it's his last resort if he's to continue the work he's dedicated to.
"There was only one other source of money that he could possibly tap into. Images of an orbital Sonomak powering up a gamma ray laser flashed through his head. He did not like it—not one little bit. He was not opposed to getting into the covert weapons business. The problem was the way those people operated. Breakthroughs were instantly classified" - p 13
The project is losing its funding b/c the money is being reallocated elsewhere & Horst has a hatred for his competitors.
""ITER," Horst said in a whisper, slowly shaking his head, feeling the rage begin to build. "Goddamned Malaysians!" It was their fault. With more money than brains, willing to pay for more than half of the cost of the project, operating under the belief that if they had the world's tallest building, the fastest rail system, the largest database of indecipherable alien noise, the biggest supercomputer, and now the world's most expensive pressure cooker, that all of those things would somehow make them a First World nation.
"They were savages.
"They prayed to snakes and poked knitting needles through their faces to prove their oneness with God. Imbeciles. "Goddamned imbeciles!"" - p 14
Horst is presented early on as, ahem, not very likeable.
One of the technicians on the project, Beong Kim, is very dedicated to performing his job as best he can.
"As he felt the equipment, his third eye, ever vigilant, continued to suck down photons, converting light to electrons, digitizing, sampling, compressing, and then uplinking the data to Low Earth orbit and the nearest Teledesic satellite. Bounced among the 240 satellites of the system, the data spanned the globe within a few milliseconds, downlinked to Taejon, Korea, and to the one-meter dish perched atop Sangbom Kim's roof." - p 16
"he could see the Sonomak.
"Beautiful.
"A two-meter-diameter vanadium alloyed stainless steel sphere, with forty-eight Pocket Acclerators protruding from it, sat in the center of the lab, draped in cabling and surrounded by rack after rack of electronics. It was a work of art, an elegant piece of physics, an instrument to reveal the truth." - p 19
Alas, it's also an accident waiting to happen.
"It was the spherical chamber of the Sonomak itself that held all her attention.
"At first she thought it had been twisted, somehow flowed. But that was not quite right. It was distorted. What had been a nearly perfect sphere of stainless steel had been elongated, practically turned into a tube, and then torn in half and retied back together in a complicated knot." - p 32
""As you imagined, manipulating Wittkowski into pushing his Sonomak to the breaking point was easy. He was more than willing to destroy it to show me what it was capable of." Quinn smiled. So damn easy, he thought. They were all such children. "We had a full analysis team there within two hours of the explosion. At the mention of "possible radiation," the locals were only too happy to relinquish jurisdiction." - p 33
"But that was just as well. The falsified report she would send back to the Makers, detailing why these animals were still far away from manipulating space-time, would be all the more believable after the explosion. She would make her escape long before the Makers even suspected what she'd been doing on this world." - p 34
Yep, there're extraterrestrials & immortals & such-like in the mix - but it's really the children who're the future, eh?
"She watched Anthony coloring, tongue sticking out between his lips as he concentrated. Katie fluttered her eyelids and the image zoomed in on Anthony. So focused, she thought. Too focused. Ever since the Sonomak had been splattered across the lab, there had been a change in Anthony. Not so outgoing, not so wild, and certainly not as mischievous. He'd become a serious little boy.
"Katie was worried.
"And then there was the business of the carrick knot. Horst thought she was crazy, that she had imagined that Anthony had made the knot earlier in the day, and that the shock of the explosion, of the destruction of piece of equipment that they'd spent years building, had confused her memory." - pp 41-42
So, of course, the Sonomak loses its original funding & turns into a top secret military project instead.
"This is why we will be funding your research," - p 46
"an intricate network of discrete knots, all neatly snugged together and interlocked like the patterns in a Penrose tile. She looked more carefully, and realized just what those knots were.
"Carrick knots.
""Note the scale," said Jack.
"Katie looked at the bottom of the photo were a large white bar denoted a spacing of one micrometer—one ten-thousandth of a centimeter." - p 47
"Jack focused on Horst, "What you do not understand, but Dr. McGuire has quickly grasped, is that a similarity exists between how our universe was formed and what has happened to the Sonomak."" - p 48
Jack & Katie & Horst have Alexandra & Quinn to cope w/ - & they're learning just how formidable they are as enemies.
""Quinn lives in a world dominated by fear. Left to his own biology, he would have been a rotting corpse sometime in the latter part of the sixth century. He continues to live only because it is my wish, and that hold over him is far more powerful than mere loyalty. And then we come to the professor. His soul is even easier to own. He wants fame and believes that this project will give him just that. He is greedy."" - pp 80-81
Of course, it's always a plus for me if a SF novel stimulates me to think of something a bit beyond the pale.
""What does infinitely farther mean?" asked Jack.
"Anthony squinted and pursed his lips. "Very, very far," he said. "A place so far that it cannot be reached by geometry."" - p 90
""It could not be explained by geometry," Jack whispered, repeating what Anthony had said only moments before." - p 91
Well, not exactly. Anthony sd: "it cannot be reached by geometry." & Jack partially echoes that as "It could not be explained by geometry". [emboldening from the reviewer] What if Anthony meant "reached" literally? Does geometry reach anything? &, if so, how?
The Sonomak has created a miniature spin-off of the galaxy in wch it originates. This explains the title of the bk wch finally appears on p 97.
""We have lost contact with the picoverse, and I believe that you two can help us reestablish contact.""
The scientists gradually discover things about the picoverse.
""The high-speed cameras showed that we were getting a sunrise every tenth second," said Alexandra. "Time is flowing 967 thousand times faster in the picoverse. One hour in our universe is equivalent to nearly 110 years in the picoverse."" - pp 101-102
There's a boy in the picoverse that Anthony had been drawing predictively.
""The boy remained stationary for exactly twenty-four hours in our time after we first saw him—2,640 years in the picoverse. Then this is what happened."
"The clock in the corner slowed, the seconds ticking by now in real time.
"The boy slowly stood, took several steps forward and then opened his mouth. His lips moved, but nothing could be heard. However, above his head in what looked like glowing neon, hovered some words. Bring me Dr. Catherine McGuire and Dr. Jack Preston, read the words. Then everything went black." - p 103
After this demand, communication was cut off.
Katie & Jack had been kept away from the new secret military research until THE BOY called for them.
"As amazing as the cone was, it was Horst that captured Jack's attention. The man looked like a scarecrow, his clothes hanging on him, his belt cinched tight around his waist, nearly a foot of the black leather hanging down from a pant loop. As baggy as his clothes were, the skin on his face seemed even baggier, hanging in folds, the waddle under his neck looking like something that belonged to a turkey. His skin was yellow and his hairline had receded several inches. There were scabs and liver spots on his forehead.
"Jack imagined that this must be what Horst's father looked like.
""We did it," said Horst. His voice sounded flat and dry. He waved a hand in the direction of the cone. "We built a picoverse."" - p 104
Well before you can say Jumpin' Jehosephat in every language known & unknown throughout human history there're multiple picoverses & the characters are stuck in one.
""In order to help acclimate you to your new world, I have been requested to explain some basic facts of existence to you," said Soloyov. "The date is April 16, 1936. You are located five miles east of Marietta, Georgia, in the Eastern Republic of Soviet America. This universe and yours share a common history until June 13, 1925, at which point it was our good fortune to find ourselves in our own universe, in a world that will never be dominated by the United States of America and the capitalist exploiters who raped the planet in your universe."" - p 138
Jack & Katie are assisted in escaping Soloyov's clutches & find themselves in the part of the USA that hasn't been absorbed by the Soviet America yet.
""Think I'm crazy?"
""No," said Jack. He'd learned a great deal about Colonel Patton in the last five days of travel, not the least of which was that the man believed in reincarnation and was certain that he'd fought in every war of consequence for the last five thousand years." - p 159
By this point I'd left behind my expectations of a completely dry hard SF novel & had adjusted to there being one wild plot jump after another. Famous historical figures repurposed for an alternate universe & particle weaponry. Why not?
"But on this Earth, a desperate U.S. government had poured enough money into Tesla's projects to make them a reality. And here, Tesla had received help from two unlikely sources. The first was a Cubist painter named Juan Gris. Of some small fame back in what Jack thought of as the real world, the contemporary of Picasso had been the most mathematically oriented of the Cubists. And the second person helping Tesla was a boy, an orphan, found working on a big plantation south of Denver—Anthony Wittkowski. These three had not only invented particle beam weapons, but built radar systems and implemented laser systems that could vaporize the best Soviet armor." - p 160
Yes, out boy Anthony has grown up fast in this new world & he's about to be reunited w/ his mom after over a decade of separation.
Waddaya know? I didn't make a single review note-to-self over the next 172pp, the plot just whipped me right along. &, then? I only made one more selection:
"Usually it was so simple, the future so obvious. Intelligence was typically an evolutionary dead end. Like a spark fanned to a roaring fire, unless controlled and tempered, the outcome was almost always total conflagration. Such intelligence needed active intervention to save them from themselves, either allowing time for the species to evolve to the point of some degree of self-control, or allowing the world to spawn another race, giving another species a chance to make the leap." - p 332
Is that similar to what's happening now? These days, I feel like the sensitive free-thinking individualists are being destroyed by the pressure to be absorbed into the hive. Homogeneity replaces intelligence w/ 'safety' & it's all engineered by an oligarchy that has no use for most humans as anything but slaves.
Read
August 31, 2020I bailed out on page 48. This just did not grab my attention. The characters were flat and there were pages and pages dedicated to describing the physics behind an experimental device. I have no idea whether the physics were theoretically feasible, but they bored me. If I'd have wanted to read so much about physics, I'd have read a textbook, not a novel.
Much of the rest of beginning part of the book was dedicated to the politics behind whether the project team developing the experimental device would retain it's funding or not. More tedium.
To be fair, this could have just been a fairly poor attempt at world building and it could have picked up later on, but I had already started skim-reading, which is a bad sign. I jumped ahead a couple of times to see if it did pick up, but it seemed to plod on in a similar vein to the beginning (although with less physics).
I'm not giving it a star rating because I read so little of it, but this is not for me.
Much of the rest of beginning part of the book was dedicated to the politics behind whether the project team developing the experimental device would retain it's funding or not. More tedium.
To be fair, this could have just been a fairly poor attempt at world building and it could have picked up later on, but I had already started skim-reading, which is a bad sign. I jumped ahead a couple of times to see if it did pick up, but it seemed to plod on in a similar vein to the beginning (although with less physics).
I'm not giving it a star rating because I read so little of it, but this is not for me.
September 29, 2015
I haven't even finished this yet, but:
DECOHERES LIKE AN UNWANTED EIGENSTATE
STICKS AROUND LIKE A BAD PENNY
DECOHERES LIKE AN UNWANTED EIGENSTATE
STICKS AROUND LIKE A BAD PENNY
February 24, 2022
I’m not sure why I only gave it 4 stars last time. Great version of gonzo, hard sci-fi.
Because it’s so hard to remember everything that happens, a spoiler recap
Because it’s so hard to remember everything that happens, a spoiler recap
June 1, 2018
This book I picked up at a used bookstore as the title caught my eye, as well as the concept. Once I got into it I found that it was interesting enough and had twists here and there that kept me reading. However, as the story progressed it became a bit more difficult to stay with it. Perhaps it was the existence of so many other worlds in the plot, and all the character morphing, but it ceased to have a proper flow for me. It definitely had promise but in the end it was an average book, in my opinion.
But isn't that science fiction? Other titles in this genre have captured me entirely, but others have disliked them entirely.
But isn't that science fiction? Other titles in this genre have captured me entirely, but others have disliked them entirely.
November 19, 2017
Multiple universes and ancient manipulators of the human race. I liked this book quite a lot, although it was a little hard to read, like most hard-sf books. But it's worth reading as it rewarded the reader. At first I felt that it was not that interesting, but then I reached page 34 and met with the first "what the- ?!" moment. And these mind-boggling and sense-of-wondery stuff kept coming and coming; it's like Metzger has crammed the book with ideas for a complete book series. Even the very end of the book was amazing.
January 11, 2025
I'm not a big fan of "alternate history" stories, but combining alternate histories with entire alternate universes proved to be a winning combination...at least for the first 200 pages before it all got bogged down in a confusing game of "Whose Universe is it Anyway?". Too many secret identities, too many BIG REVEALS, and an explosive ending (literally) which gives readers more of a paradox than a resolution. I don't know whether or not Metzger wrote a sequel but I certainly won't be looking for it.
September 21, 2019
I absolutely loved this book. It not only had a great plot line, but also a different way of explaining the multiverse. It is interesting to thing see that this is how new universes. It also makes sense with the logic behind it. This book also explores the morality of humankind and if we can do something or even if we should. I am glad that I found this book.
July 20, 2020
The flat mundane characterizations in the opening chapter are a huge red flag.
And yet I keep going. Bad choice.
The cliche ridden, boring people in this novel have no spark whatsoever. There’s nothing new or interesting in their motivations or inner dialogue. Barely 30 pages in and already I’m scanning ahead instead of reading, hoping it gets better. Nope.
The cliche ridden, boring people in this novel have no spark whatsoever. There’s nothing new or interesting in their motivations or inner dialogue. Barely 30 pages in and already I’m scanning ahead instead of reading, hoping it gets better. Nope.
September 12, 2018
Good story
February 17, 2020
It was marketed as hard science fiction I found it closer to Lovecraftian horror with math. (The characters do the math us the audience never see any equations)
February 20, 2020
Starts well, fades rapidly
It goes, too far into its own state of logic and confuses and confounds rather than illuminates. Good fun but ultimately lapses in enjoyable narrative.
It goes, too far into its own state of logic and confuses and confounds rather than illuminates. Good fun but ultimately lapses in enjoyable narrative.
October 24, 2024
This book is heavy into the physics babble. You either like that style or you don’t. I wasn’t a fan. Some interesting characters but too much left hanging.
May 10, 2020
Fun premise, good hard sc-fi. I found some of the character development a little thin. I especially wanted Katie to have goals and motivations beyond love/family.
February 9, 2008
I picked this up while I was back in the States, wandering without aim or purpose through the bookstore. It's a real shame how far my sense of what's good in modern sci fi and fantasy has decayed since I've been over here. I am very grateful to my friend Josh for helping me pick out some good ones. This one, however, was one I picked out on my own. Mainly because it had a blurb from Gregory Benford on the cover, and also because it was about creating sub-universes, a topic that I find endlessly interesting.
In fact, I think Benford did a book like that. Or if not Benford, then somebody like him - a story where some enterprising scientists created a universe in the lab, and then watched it evolve, defending it from universe-shattering threats like university budget cuts.
This book wasn't like that book. This is more of a hard sci-fi, cross-universe adventure story.
A high-energy lab at Georgia Tech in 2007 build the Sonomak, a machine capable of squeezing space-time down to unimaginable levels. Why do they do that? For the same reason most things like this are done: because they can. The effect, however, is rather unexpected: they create a mirror universe, one very much like theirs, but slightly different. And back in time. Or something.
As much fun as this was - a story with alternate histories, high-tech architecture, hyper-evolved Neanderthals, extra-universal AIs and all kinds of weirdness - there were times where I got a little lost in the explanations. It's obvious that Metzger has done a lot of research for this novel, and has a good idea what he's talking about, but from time to time, I had to kind of blink my eyes and shake my head and skip forward.
All that aside, though, it was a fun - and quick - read. A good airplane novel....
In fact, I think Benford did a book like that. Or if not Benford, then somebody like him - a story where some enterprising scientists created a universe in the lab, and then watched it evolve, defending it from universe-shattering threats like university budget cuts.
This book wasn't like that book. This is more of a hard sci-fi, cross-universe adventure story.
A high-energy lab at Georgia Tech in 2007 build the Sonomak, a machine capable of squeezing space-time down to unimaginable levels. Why do they do that? For the same reason most things like this are done: because they can. The effect, however, is rather unexpected: they create a mirror universe, one very much like theirs, but slightly different. And back in time. Or something.
As much fun as this was - a story with alternate histories, high-tech architecture, hyper-evolved Neanderthals, extra-universal AIs and all kinds of weirdness - there were times where I got a little lost in the explanations. It's obvious that Metzger has done a lot of research for this novel, and has a good idea what he's talking about, but from time to time, I had to kind of blink my eyes and shake my head and skip forward.
All that aside, though, it was a fun - and quick - read. A good airplane novel....
July 11, 2013
Most SF readers don't worry that much about whether amazing things in SF are truly possible in the future. Many readers are most impressed by SF which pictures things that are most unlike life today (in a futuristic way or exerts the most power or does what is now most unreachable). Such readers will probably find this book awe-inspiring. It deals with human scientists creating new universes, moving between universes, how histories in other universe might vary, and such. It includes beings that came from an earlier universe from which "the Makers" brought the first human universe into being.
There are some aspects of the book which may raise issues for some readers.
The issues are:
1) The beginning in which the apparent focus of the book keeps shifting many times
2) Apparent supernatural powers. These are "explained" by some characters being from the parent universe to ours and one character being from a human civilization 1000's of years beyond ours. Neither seems to justify the incredible energies needed to manipulate space-time and such to be contained in and dispensed by a human body and/or humanoid - and in particular without these vast energies having any leakage which would have side-effects on nearby objects or lifeforms.
There are some aspects of the book which may raise issues for some readers.
The issues are:
1) The beginning in which the apparent focus of the book keeps shifting many times
2) Apparent supernatural powers. These are "explained" by some characters being from the parent universe to ours and one character being from a human civilization 1000's of years beyond ours. Neither seems to justify the incredible energies needed to manipulate space-time and such to be contained in and dispensed by a human body and/or humanoid - and in particular without these vast energies having any leakage which would have side-effects on nearby objects or lifeforms.
March 26, 2011
This book wanted to be a hard sci-fi epic, but ends up taking us through a series of parallel universes that get consistently more and more absurd, until you're wondering, "How the heck did we get here, anyway?" I found that the scientific explanations of why things were happening were extremely convoluted and hard to follow. Maybe it was because I don't have an advanced degree in physics, but I've never had trouble following hard sci-fi before. I kept finding myself asking, "Why are the characters here again?" and having to tell myself, "Shut up, it doesn't matter. All you need to know is that when they press this button the story will advance." That's never a good sign.
I will say, there are some pretty cool images in the book that have stuck with me, such as a field several kilometers square teeming with robots moving on seemingly random trajectories, and the characters had to decipher the pattern to avoid being crushed as they worked their way across. Why were the robots there and what was their purpose? I don't really remember, because I didn't think it made sense when I read it. But the image he painted was cool enough.
I will say, there are some pretty cool images in the book that have stuck with me, such as a field several kilometers square teeming with robots moving on seemingly random trajectories, and the characters had to decipher the pattern to avoid being crushed as they worked their way across. Why were the robots there and what was their purpose? I don't really remember, because I didn't think it made sense when I read it. But the image he painted was cool enough.
September 12, 2014
A crazy romp through a psychotic but well educated writers mind. Some of the people I recommended this book to have said it was far too complicated almost like reading a science journal. In a way I guess that could be true. But for me it ticked all the right boxes. The what ifs and the possibles of the plot are extremely imaginative. The knot on the front of the book really represents the plot because it twists and interweaves so often. I have to give Robert every credit for this book it kept me entertained and had my mind ticking over the way I like it to be. Go ahead and try it but don't expect a Harry Potter ease of read. If you get it then it will make your life that much better. If you don't then move on I don't think its loss will hinder your life.
August 10, 2016
Lots of imaginative stuff going on, and the plot is really huge in scope, and well developed and presented. This could go up to 5 stars - I hope I'll understand the book better after talking about it. The only things holding me back are that as the novel develops, I found the (already not necessarily super likable) characters getting unmoored and more like pawns than characters. The other is just that speculative/alternate histories with famous figures as prominent characters can put me off. It was a little off-putting in Cryptonomicon, and it was at first in the Baroque Cycle (though that quickly went way over the top, so it sort of ended up feeling different).
September 17, 2009
I read CUSP first, but enjoyed this earlier story more. I love novels that begin smoothly, familiarizing the reader with characters, giving no indication of events to come, and then introduce a rapidly descending bomb of utter mayhem at the exact moment you begin to feel safe. A wild adventure of physics and insane possibilities. Like Heinlein except for the fact that you are consistently terrified, rather than warm and fuzzy.
June 6, 2010
Lured to this book by the promise of "huge ideas, cosmic concepts & ramifications well-explored". Mostly disappointed as the book did not deliver. It is hard to stay with a novel when you don't really care about any of the characters.
January 26, 2012
a perfectly serviceable scifi book based around the ability to get to/create parallel universes. it kept my interest just fine on the plane ride out to Seattle, but i had zero compunction about leaving it behind when i came back East.
March 5, 2012
Did this have promise? Absolutely.
Did it deliver? Not really. Nice start, but got weird, and then lamely weird.
Not such an eloquent review, I know, but frankly I can't be bothered for this one.
Did it deliver? Not really. Nice start, but got weird, and then lamely weird.
Not such an eloquent review, I know, but frankly I can't be bothered for this one.
August 23, 2009
This was an interesting and challenging book to read. I liked the way the characters entered various alternate picoverses, sometimes for seconds at a time.
April 13, 2011
Well, any book about multiple universes is bound to take you places you don't expect, and this book is no exception. The story is really quite unusual, and has stuck with me for a while now.
May 7, 2011
Wild, imaginative plot, but it moved too quickly without fully developing the situation. Still, a fun read.
December 12, 2012
Nice use of intraverse, but a bit weird (neanderthales..?) and complex ( future kid and so...).
January 17, 2013
Notes from my old paper book log: "Hard SF, plot wandered ALL over the place, a MESS!"
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