Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Bowl of Heaven (2014)

Two big names in SF collaborate on a Big Dumb Object novel. The titular 'bowl' is a titanic construction built around a red star and travelling through the galaxy collecting life-forms. It is, in effect, half a Dyson sphere. Appropriate to this conceit, Benford and Niven have here written a half-arsed novel. Less BDO, more BOOO!

The thing is, I've a soft spot for these kinds of rude Rama retreads ('Re-rendezvous With Rama'?), and even Niven's hilariously cack-handed writing and plotting can't spoil the original Ringworld novel for me, where traces of grandeur still manage to cling, like wisps of morning fog, around the main idea (I say nothing of the myriad sequels, which are all terrible). BDOs are cool; scale and sublimity and the chance to let yourself wander, imaginatively speaking, around a varied and beguiling environment. Bowl of Heaven, though, is lamentably bad. There are two different levels on which it is simply not yet ready to be published. One is the level of story. We start with a sub-light interstellar spaceship SunSeeker, on its way from Earth to a planet called Glory. Key crewmembers are woken from hibernation because the ship's trajectory, in a co-incidence the scale of the cosmos licenses us to call 'bollocks', has crossed paths with the Bowl of Heaven. Since there's some question as to whether supplies will last the rest of the SunSeeker's voyage, on account of whoever supplied said supplies Earthside being obviously an idiot, the crew decide to fly their starship, complete with its sleeping cargo of thousands of human settlers, into the Bowl. This they do by nipping up the superheated plasma stream of the BDO's exhaust. You see, the 'bowl' has a big hole in its base, and mirrors in its concave inner surface focussing the starlight back on a spot on the star, which in turn shoots out the colossal plasma jet that moves the whole thing through space. The motion forward exactly counteracts the tendency of the bowl to fall into the gravitational well of the star, keeping the system in equilibrium. Except that late in the book some of the earthers see a sort of home movie of the Bowl being built, and there's no explanation of how the structure is kept in its orbit during the eons-long construction. No matter. Surely we can agree that flying up the stellar exhaust pipe is a stupid thing to do.

Of course, we know that Benford and Niven (I like to think of them as 'Nivbenford', the result of a tragic matter-transporter malfunction) need to get their human characters aboard Rama, Ringworld, Orbitsville, the Bowl of Heaven as soon as possible, so they can have Adventures. Let's give them a bye for that. The problem is once the characters are there, the story gets flushed down the cosmic toilet-bowl of heaven in short order. Nothing very much happens. The characters are so flat and interchangeable that not even the authors are able to keep them distinct. The landing party is a group of ten people [87] that immediately splits up, main character Cliff Kammash taking four with him, and Beth Marble taking, er, five with her. What? Sometimes the authors forget that Cliff is called Cliff and call him Carl [for instance on p.327]. Individuals specified as being in one group are casually referred to as being in the other group. One character is killed by native life forms, watched helplessly by other characters from the far side of a towering transparent wall. Those same characters later refer back to the event as if there had been no wall. Several events happen twice in quick succession, with slightly different characters, as if Nivbenford was trying out alternate possibilities only to forget to delete the less favoured one. The captain leaves the bridge, and a few pages later leaves the bridge. No sooner have the landing party arrived than they spend literally days trying to open a closed hatch (to, unless I misread, outer space) by burning it with seemingly inexhaustible lasers. It turns out they can't; but I don't know why they were even trying. There's little overall shape to the story, and only at the end do we discover (hah! ahaha!) that there is no end to the story either, for it is to be continued in an indeterminate number of sequels.

I mentioned two things; and the second is the worldbuilding. This is more deplorable, in a way, since the novel really only exists to display the cool BDO. But Nivbenford seem to have run out of space on the back of the envelope they used to plan this structure. It's big: 'bigger than the orbit of Mercury' [34]. To be precise 'it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth's orbit' [247]. Which is certainly bigger than the orbit of Mercury, I suppose. It rotates in nine days [247] except on p 315 where it rotates 'in about ten days'. How is the implausibly earth-like atmosphere kept inside? A barrier is stretched across the inside of the bowl, like clingfilm. Imagine the size of the roll they must have used! Ah, but how does the bowl steer itself, slow down to pick up new life forms, stop etc? We're not told, presumably because it can't. Out of what improbably rigid material is the bowl made, to prevent it breaking-up? Again we're not told, though we are vouchsafed that the construction of the Bowl entailed 'girders ... scaffolds ... crossbars ... joists and brackets the size of planets' [242]. Pull the other one. Nivbenford's imaginations have failed them, and they've reverted to an Empire State Building Sized construction rather than a solar-system sized one. This novel puts the 'ow!' in 'bowl' and the 'heave' in 'heaven'. If I were you I wouldn't touch this Bowl of Heaven with a barge-pole. Of heaven.