Artifact by Gregory Benford Scifi Book Review
There’s science fiction and then there’s fiction about science. Artifact, by Gregory Benford, is the former. What Mr. Benford (himself a physicist) has tried to do is basically create a story around the concept of a new element and/or set of scientific standards.
The story opens with a young architect, Claire, working feverishly on an archaelogical site in Greece. The story itself is set in a very near future, where Greece has decided to revert to socialism and California somehow decides to chop itself in to two. Claire, meanwhile, is only interested in the unique finds she’s discovering, while simultaneously trying to hold off the Greece site controller (who is also one of the up-and-coming leaders of the social rebellion). Finally she discovers something that just shouldn’t be in the dig site, which sets off a series of events leading to the discovery of a whole new world of science.
I hate to say it – Artifact leaves the reader disappointed. I was eager to chew through an “aliens left something underground” story a-la Michael Crichton’s Sphere, but instead the story of this element is pretty tame. There are really 2 parts of Benford’s writing that are frustrating. For one, the dialogue is contrived and flows horribly. Characters in his story apparently aren’t comfortable conjugating. Secondly, he plays out the “New England versus the South” subplot between two main characters in a rediculous fashion. The setting that he contrives is one where Southern mathematicians and Northeastern archaeologists are from totally different worlds and stunned at the existance of the other. It just didn’t play out right, and left me saying, “Ok, get back to the super weapon!”
At the end of it all is an attempt at climax which, sadly, leaves the obvious nemesis to succumb to his inevitable fate, while the hero and heroine live out a happily ever after.
The story isn’t completely flawed. I give Benford a lot of credit for knowing a LOT more about the periodic table and other scientific stuff than I could ever grasp. But I think that’s sorta the problem – at the end of the story you realize that Benford knows his stuff, but the topic he was trying to convey is just a hair above the average science fiction enthusiast. I read sci-fi to be entertained, not confused and feeling stupid. A great author can take a complex mathematical or physics topic and convey it using ordinary concepts; sadly Benford may need a little more practice to make it worthwhile.