Product Description

This new, special edition of the classic concluding volume of this defining series by the eminent physicist and Nebula Award-winning author contains a teaser chapter from Benford's new hardcover, "The Sunborn."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33108 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fifteen years ago, Benford's Timescape set the tone for the subgenre of "hard" science fiction that deals with quantum effects and particle physics, the discoveries and theories of which often make their fictional expressions seem more akin to fantasy than to traditional SF. Now, with this sixth and concluding volume of his Galactic Center series, Benford, a physicist himself, takes the form to either its apotheosis or its death knell. Though replete with fascinating ideas and exhilarating events that are, for the most part, elucidated with skill, the novel contains several chapters that may confound even readers who have followed the adventures of Nigel Walmsley since his initial appearance in 1977. Walmsley begins by relating his escapades to Toby Bishop, whose family is proceeding toward its destiny in the long-standing battle between organic and mechanical life-forms. The Bishop family and Walmsley are aided or impeded by several other life-forms whose roles and goals in the quest for ultimate survival are central to the story. While a reader's tenacity?which is what sets humans apart from others in Benford's conception of the universe?is occasionally tested, this novel stands as a worthy conclusion to what now should be acknowledged as the most important and involving hard SF series yet written.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In the sixth novel of his Galactic Center epic, Benford brings the series to a dramatic close with a peek into humanity's future 37,000 years hence. Nigel Walmsley, twentieth-century Earth's first starship traveler, who figured in the saga's first installment, In the Ocean of Night (1977), returns to recount recent adventures inside the Esty, an anomalous shelter of space-time existing outside a black hole near the galaxy's true center. Walmsley's listener is Toby Bishop, the adolescent protagonist of Furious Gulf , whose family and fellow humans have been decimated by an insidious, machine-based life-form known as the mechs. Together, Walmsley, Toby, and the remnants of Toby's family must find the means to outwit the mechs before they penetrate the Esty and destroy all trace of humanity. Benford makes up for his somewhat pedantic prose with a wealth of fascinating scientific speculation in a dazzling finish to one of the best hard-sf sagas ever written. Carl Hays

Ingram
In the epic conclusion to the Galactic Center series, the hope of human survival comes down to one man, an ancient scientist from the distant past who leads a struggle against a gigantic race called the Old Ones. Reprint. K.

Customer Reviews

Too many irrelevant characters. Too long. Too tedious.
Gregory Benford is a smart guy. It shows. The problem is when he tries to show us just how smart he is. This book shouldnt be approached unless the reader is armed with a Ph.D in astro physics. Benford introduces the concept of an esty, and although central to the plot and events of the novel, Benford does a bad job of making the etsy (is it a time? place? neither?) comprehensible to the average reader.

Also, the book isnt helped by the way Benford devotes entire chapters to events and characters, who are memorable only for the degree to which they turn out to be irrelevant. A very disapointing end to a very promising series.

Thank God it's over!
After struggling for months, I finally got through the Galactic Center "epic" (and I use the word loosely) by Gregory Benford. To say that the series was a major let-down doesn't half-cover it. I've read a lot of sci-fi novels, and I can't remember being that disappointed before, except with the works of Linda Nagata and Howard Hendricks (both certified 0-starers, IMHO). Let's see...

First of all, the characters are despairingly two-dimensional (make that one, for some). You don't know what they're here for and, frankly, you don't very much care. The story (or lack thereof) is strange to say the least: despite raves such as "no holds-barred adventure", nothing much happens, so that the books are marginally less thrilling than a 2,000-page financial report. (The focus of the story is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and I can't help wondering whether that prompted Mr Benford to write books which are so empty of meaning. And to think that he needed almost twenty years to produce them!)

I won't even speak of the way a 30,000+ war against mechs (yuck!) is resolved in 3 minutes flat. I know it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but still...

Some aliens are interesting, but the story moves along and leaves them behind each time you think you're going to learn something about them! So tell me - why are they here? As filler? Hum. (For example, the best part of the series is, for me, the novella-size sea adventure of Warren in book two. But the aliens he meets are never spoken of again, and Warren himself disappears from the story after that. So, once again, what's the point?)

And the esty - a collection of places/times where/when one of the characters wanders for about 100 pages, meeting all kinds of people who don't have anything to do with the story. The first time is painful enough, but Mr. Benford does it to you *three* times in a row! A piece of advice if I may, Mr Benford: next time you want to write a book, please wait until you've got a real story, and not some disjointed ideas to mix randomly, because the resulting mix can be awful. And the philosophy of it! "The thing about aliens is, they're alien." Wow! OK, but once would be enough, don't you think? Why rehash it every ten pages or so?

If they awarded a price for "best disappointment of the year", this book (indeed, the whole series) would win it hands down...

...And then, a miracle happens.
This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.

Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.

Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse