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A review by grayjay
In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford
3.0
A future grounded in reality, Nigel is an astronaut working for NASA in a future where "more efficient economies" are surpassing the US and Brazil is trying to buy American Airlines. A new futuristic religion, called the New Sons, is taking over the old ones and gaining momentum.
Early in his career on a comet speeding toward earth where Nigel has landed to plant a bomb, he discovers a dead alien ship, Earth's first encounter with extra-terrestrial life, making him an important player when a live one arrives in the solar system twenty years later.
On the positive, Benford was ahead of his time, playing with gender expectations, and having the protagonist in a thruple. On the negative, the book was a pretty bad fix-up of seperate stories. The first half was coherent, but the second half felt like a few different stories cobbled together.
**Spoiler** Intelligent life in the universe is mostly represented by machine civilizations that outlived their organic creators. The Visitor travels the universe observing systems and planets and keeping an eye out for organic civilizations, like Earth, that possess the chaos factor that leads to destruction.
Early in his career on a comet speeding toward earth where Nigel has landed to plant a bomb, he discovers a dead alien ship, Earth's first encounter with extra-terrestrial life, making him an important player when a live one arrives in the solar system twenty years later.
On the positive, Benford was ahead of his time, playing with gender expectations, and having the protagonist in a thruple. On the negative, the book was a pretty bad fix-up of seperate stories. The first half was coherent, but the second half felt like a few different stories cobbled together.
**Spoiler** Intelligent life in the universe is mostly represented by machine civilizations that outlived their organic creators. The Visitor travels the universe observing systems and planets and keeping an eye out for organic civilizations, like Earth, that possess the chaos factor that leads to destruction.