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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A few weeks ago I was flipping through the New York Times Book Review when I came across a brief, favorable review for this science fiction tale. This one was pretty wild too. The author is a former rocket scientist who now works in the field of commercial robotics so the science within The Collapsium is both informed and a little dizzying. But you don't need to be a rocket scientist to enjoy this book (or even a super genius like me). The hero of the story is the brilliant scientist Bruno de Towaji, the inventor of collapsium, and a royal consort of Queen Tamra Lutui of Tonga, the figurehead queen of the solar system. Collapsium is collapsed matter in the form of egg-sized black holes which allow virtually instantaneous transmission of information and matter — including humans — throughout the solar system. Basically collapsium allows people to fax themselves to various fax ports set up throughout the solar system via a collapsium network. You can also create copies of yourself! While Bruno has been enjoying a self-imposed exile conducting experiments on his own manufactured planet, rival scientist Marlon Sykes has been busy building a ring of collapsium around the sun to improve the current collapsium network. But then a saboteur causes this Ring Collapsiter to fall toward the sun, imperiling the entire solar system, and Queen Tamra calls on Bruno de Towaji for help. I found this book to be as entertaining as it is bizarre. Not only does the author do wildly fun things with the element collapsium, but another element called wellstone is thrown in as well. Wellstone is programmable matter capable of emulating almost any substance whether it be natural, artificial, or even hypothetical. McCarthy spins this improbable tale with wit, verve and humor and the result is a thrill-ride of wild science and adventure. (  ) woodge | Nov 20, 2009 |  Vapidly pretentious nonsense. (  ) VadZ | Sep 5, 2009 | Archren | Feb 13, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 055358443X, Mass Market Paperback)Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure. A real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot, McCarthy continually sets a very high standard for good old-fashioned space stories. In The Collapsium, McCarthy builds on a lovely novella to tell the far-future story of two scientists entrenched in a rivalry that may save, or destroy, the solar system. Tamra Lutui, the Queen of Sol, brings together the brilliant enemies in order to prevent the Ring Collapsiter, a vast ring of strange matter, from falling into the sun. So it is that Bruno de Towaji, inventor of collapsium--crystals made up of tiny black holes that can transport matter instantaneously across vast distances--must find a way to work with Marlon Sykes, who came up with the Ring to change the nature of communication forever. McCarthy makes liberal use of his extensive science knowledge, especially when he describes the nature of high-concept physics ideas like collapsium or wellstone (programmable matter!), but luckily, his literary skills are up to the task of moving the narrative along, keeping us in suspense, and creating characters who are worth reading about. His descriptions of the physical phenomena surrounding the artifacts of high-energy material manipulation are deft and fascinating:
A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become--seemingly overnight--a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! Towaji and Sykes labor to save the Queendom and outwit the saboteur trying to wreck the Ring, all the while burdened by a byzantine and bureaucratic social structure with demands for party appearances, verbal sparring, and quick thinking. While those of us who aren't physics mavens might quail at some of the terms and ideas McCarthy casually uses, it's his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction's masters. --Therese Littleton (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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