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My Bookspotcentral review ( )

Better known for his fantasy novels (eg. The Recluce novels), Modesitt also writes science fiction novels. The Eternity Artifact is set in one of his typical SF worlds: future SF, multiple polities. intrigue, and action. Competent characters, often one or more who is tied to an espionage organization. Lots of sociological speculation in and amongst the action.

In this instance, these usual tools are put into a space opera, showing an expedition to an runaway alien planet by a polity who has some very serious rivals. Rivals serious enough to use sabotage, agents and even outright space warfare to stop the expedition, or steal its secrets for itself.

The action is seen through the perspective of four protagonists, one of whom is not who he appears to the rest. Its told in first person throughout, and so we get lots of internal consideration and thought as the very different quartet--an artist, a former agent turned professor, a shuttle pilot, and an armorer more than he appears journey to a Big Dumb Object--the planet of Danann. It is the epynomous "Eternity Artifact", an unbelievably ancient alien world in a universe where no other aliens have ever been found. A tempting prize indeed!

Some don't really care for Modesitt's style, since he does like to laden sociological speculation heavily into his plot and story, and it can be off-putting. I wasn't entirely thrilled with Recluce, for example, and have enjoyed his other novels more. Eternity Artifact falls into this category, and I think its because of the multiple protagonists. This allows for a variety of perspectives which manage to keep a balance of ideas in tension.

The ending and denouement feel a bit weak in my opinion, but in the getting there, I was reasonably entertained. And whether you agree with his opinions or not, Modesitt does raise some good sociological questions in the story. And there is even the barest hint of a romance, too, swirled in.

I enjoyed the book. ( )

Gave it the lowest possible rating, because although this is supposed to be 'hard sf', it managed to make a major and fairly obvious mathematical error (that turned out to be pretty important to the story) on the VERY FIRST F___ING PAGE.

Sorry, now you know (one of) my pet peeves.

The first page, ala Jack Vance, gives a short description of the discovery of an strange object. He states a 'mass', 'radius', and some other parameters, with fairly precise values. Being an amateur astronomer of sorts, I thought the numbers looked a little funny and plugged them in to my handy calculator, and....there was no way in HELL I could make the math come out right. I made all sorts of assumptions such as 'diameter' confused for 'radius', about possible typos on the numbers (easy for copy editors to do), etc. etc.; no luck.

I figured, at this point, okay, an honest mistake on Modesitt's part. No problemo, I'll let it slide.

Roughly ten pages later, the text state that the GRAVITY is such-and-such times larger on this hypothetical object than Earth standard. Hmmmmm, didn't he mention the MASS being as being this figure before? Okay, whatever.

And then, around page 60, he mentions the DENSITY being the SAME multiple of standard.

YARRGHH! If he's going to write what seems to resemble hard SF, could he a LEAST not confuse density, mass, and gravity? These are all related but certainly not identical quantities, and all are dependent on slightly different physical parameters, which presumably do not fluctuate by artistic whim.

Mass - the quantity of matter in a body.

Gravity - proportional to the mass divided by the SQUARE of the radius of the body

Density - proportional to the mass divided by the CUBE of the radius of the body

There is NO combination of numbers that can get all these to come out equal, save one: the values for the Earth itself, where 1 = 1 = 1. This is a so-called 'trivial' example.

Why did he give these numbers on the first page at all?

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Whew! Now why did I go to all this trouble? Because... the rest of the book was extremely boring, a lot of idiot characters (except for a bitch-with-a-heart-of-gold shuttle pilot) that spent a lot of time not finding out much about a physically unlikely alien artifact/planet/whatever.

Phooey. At least Jack Vance could get his math right. ( )