'In a 3500-year-old Mycenaean Tomb, an artifact has been unearthed. An incomprehensible object in an impossible place; its age, purpose and origins unknown.Its substance has scientists baffled. And the miracle it contains does not belong on this Earth.It is an enigma with no equal in recorded history and its discovery has unleashed a storm of intrigue, theft and espionage that is pushing nations to the brink of war.It is mankind's greatest discovery… and worst nightmare.It may already have obliterated one world. Ours is next.'Blurb from the 2001 orbit paperback edition.I find myself being rather ambivalent about Benford novels. Admittedly, the science is as accurate as it possibly could be, and if it does get above some people's heads, Benford has provided an afterword in which he gives a 'Quarks for Dummies' lecture in some of the more important aspects of subatomic particles.'Timescape' is a novel which, although listed in Pringle's '100 Best SF Novels', is rather dull and lacks pace and background colour.'Foundation's Fear' suffered from both a lack of characterisation and a sense of disjointedness in that the narrative was attempting to follow both Seldon and a pair of resurrected AI simulations.'Artifact' however, is a very readable if lightweight piece, but does have its faults.In structure it resembles very much the outline for a film including a short prologue sequence (which in a film would be shown before the main credits) set 3500 years in the past before the next chapter brings us bang up to modern day at the same location.Claire Anderson is a feisty Boston Irish archaeologist excavating a Mycenaean tomb under the watchful eye of the Greek authorities, while Greece itself is transforming into a One-Party Socialist State.Kontos, a brutish Greek archaeologist turned politician, is attempting to oust the Americans from the dig. Claire then discovers a strange cube within the tomb, carved from black stone with an amber cone protruding from the forward surface.Tests on the cube produce curious results. It is, for one thing, radioactive.Kontos proves to be a lecherous Greek as well as a Socialist. After a final showdown Kontos has the cube packed up, prepared to claim it as his own find. Claire and US mathematician John Bishop return to the tomb and reclaim not only Claire's notes but the cube, which they feel quite entitled to carry off to the US with them.Benford makes no attempt to question the moral basis of this. Indeed, it seems implicit within the text that such an act is necessary as the US is the only country capable of examining and learning the secrets of such an object, and the Greeks of course, would only be interested in it for its military capabilities, while the Americans, God Bless them, would be concerned only for the pursuit of science and the artifact's peaceful applications.The Greeks attempt to reclaim the artifact, but are thwarted, so they declare war on Turkey instead.This may seem a flippant over-simplification of Benford's portrayals, but had he attempted to put some shades of grey into depictions of the two races this would have been a far superior book. The American characters are uniformly honest, decent people while the Greeks are two-dimensional caricatures; corrupt, devious, lecherous and violent.On a Hollywood level, America (and indeed the UK if one considers Bond movies to be representative of British cinema) often gets away with portraying evil foreign regimes in this cliched way, but one could argue that many recent productions of this type are aware of the ironic nature of their depictions, which border on self-parody, particularly in the case of contemporary Bond movies and Vin Diesel's 'XXX'One expects an author in this day and age, particularly an SF author, to be more aware of the political and social nuances. No regime is truly evil. No democracy is truly good.Sadly, the whole badly thought out political nonsense tends to detract from the artifact itself, a natural trap for two bound singularities (like two big quarks) one of which has been jarred loose but is returning like a heat-seeking monster to find its twin.It's a shame really. If there were less of the political and racial polarisation, this could have been something half decent.
The artifact itself was interesting. It was the plot that was dull. Characters were a bit on the dry side, too. I did like all the science, though. But I found a glaring scientific error. There's a scene where an ancient map is found. It's a couple of feet high and a couple of feet across. It turns out to be made of ivory. When I read this, all I could think was that I would really love to see the elephant that provided such a humongous tusk. It must have been quite an animal.Aside from that, I thought the concept was good, but a little more could have been done with it from a creative and story-telling angle. The author seemed more concerned with showing off his scientific knowledge than telling a story.
What do You think about Artifact (2001)?
A science fiction novel that started out with a very intriguing prelude and ended up having WAY TOO MUCH scientific calculations and information for the average reader to even understand and care about....the characters were interesting enough and the story would have been much more fun to read if it had omitted at least 250 pages of scientific jargon that was repeated over and over without making giving the average reader a clue of what it really meant. Pretty dull book with some moments of intrigue, mystery and romance.
—Tracy Walters
Caught up in the action and thrills of an Indiana Jones adventure, we sometimes forget that Jones is a thief. In fact, he is the worst kind of thief the archaeological community knows. He steals unique antiquities, sneaking them away from their sites; and then sells them to collectors, destroying forever the intellectual value they might have had in situ.Gregory Benford's Artifact starts centuries ago, with a mysterious stone artifact being buried in a tomb. But each time we think we have this story pinned firmly into a genre, it morphs on us; first Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, then James Bond and Dr. No. With another flashback to ancient times, we learn the cube-shaped artifact is an object of power; we see that some of the grave-diggers were entombed with it. Fast-forward to present day (or rather, to a mid-1980s "present" with a still-viable Soviet Union). The artifact has been unearthed at an archaeological dig. Because the nominal leader of the dig, American Claire Anderson, has a beef with Kontos, the swinish Greek she has been saddled with as "co-director," she does not reveal that she and her assistant George have found the artifact. Instead, under a two-week deadline to finish the dig, she flies back to the States and seeks a metallurgist from MIT to come back to Greece and help her assay the stone of the artifact.She meets John Bishop in his office at MIT, and hires him to do the job. John doesn't tell Claire he is a mathematician, not a physical scientist, for two reasons. One, he likes scuba diving, and hopes to be able to dive in Greece when this job is done. And two, he's really attracted to Claire.Back at the tomb, George has finished disinterring the artifact, and found a pipe leading down to the sea behind it. John's test results are puzzling—they reveal a cubical cavity inside the artifact, lined with heavy metals. From an amber cone that projects from one face of the stone cube, they glimpse an occasional flash of light. A slight humming noise comes from the object, and it has an eerie feel to the touch.Benford has woven several disparate elements together into this skillful tapestry. Archaeology and academic power-mongering fight with vigor (though with less blood), equal to the political and cultural battles of the Greeks who are striving to keep their antiquities in the country. Claire's feminism vies with John's southern views of femininity and family. And the MIT physicists and mathematicians struggle to define and contain this genie in the bottle.Like David Brin's The Practice Effect and Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, this is a book that vaulted the author into the ranks of science fiction's "Killer Bs." It is the best kind of science fiction there is, demanding your full attention, changing only one element, then asking what happens if this is true?
—Pat Cummings
You really need a physics degree to follow this one, and I don't have that degree. Fortunately, I do have advanced math and some engineering physics under my metaphorical belt, otherwise I would've been completely lost when reading this book. As it was I was only lost about half of the time.All the elements of a good story are here, a mystery, interesting characters and conflict, but the author just doesn't seem to know how to pull it all together successfully. For every step the plot or character development advances, you're slapped with a load of technobabble. A little science is good, too much and you're writing a technical manual, not a sci-fi novel.I really was intrigued by this mysterious artifact and what it ended up containing, and by the character conflicts, but overall it was just impossible to focus on any of that when trying to wade through yet *another* round of math/chemistry/physics lectures.Give this one a miss, unless of course reading textbooks is your idea of a good time.
—Liz
