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I haven’t been writing very much this year, although I do have a few things I’m working on, like this post. Instead, I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve mentioned Obama’s fat book with small type here a while back. I re-read a few I already had, like Dune, and discovered that with Amazon Prime you not only get “free” TV and movies, you get a free to read library.
        One of the “free” (covered in the monthly cost) books was Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, which suffered from a flaw that caused my Voyage to Earth story to be rejected by F&SF: the beginning didn’t grab the junior editor. I fixed it by adding another story that did start well, what Lester del Rey called a “fix-up”. He would turn a bunch of short stories he couldn’t sell into a novel.
        I didn’t read much of the Stephenson book; after two chapters you should have a better idea of what the book is about than the book’s title hinted at, but a lot of you have recommended some of his books. I found Andy Wier’s Randomize; if I’d had to pay for it I would have been pissed, as it was a short story, not a novel. A very good short story, but three bucks for a single story when you get half a dozen, in print, from F&SF for seven is a ripoff. Beware buying Amazon ebooks!
        Then I found a book by someone I never heard of, Douglas Phillips. Wikipedia hadn’t heard of him, either, although there are others with the same name, none of whom are writers. The book was titled Quantum Space, and the book itself was as nerdy as its title. It was the science fiction equivalent of David Allan Coe’s The Perfect Country Song, with about every SF meme there is.
        Unlike Stephenson’s book, it grabbed me right away. Written in 2017 it is set in our current dystopian future, the one 20th century writers never foresaw, although the story isn’t dystopian. It starts with three astronauts in a Soyuz on their way home from the ISS, then cuts to a Russian watching for its contrail. He sees the contrail, then a bright blue flash and a loud bang, and the contrail stops. Russia has lost three astronauts, one of whom is an American.
        Later we find that they’re not just lost in outer space, but in quantum space. In this bit of fiction (with an afterword that explains the real from the imaginary), when they found the Higgs Bosun in 2012, they found that string theory was accurate, and Europe and the US have classified the information. It’s explained why, but I’m leaving no spoilers except for the space aliens hinted at early in the book.
        There are physicists, FBI agents, evil rich people giving China classified information, the military, the LHC and the collider at Fermilab (where much of the story takes place). It’s pretty much action-packed all the way through; it would make a great movie, although some of the dialogue seems like padding. Of course, I’ve never seen a movie that matched the book exactly; The Running Man shared almost nothing with the book, but The Green Mile was very close in most respects.
        Someone who knew nothing about quarks and gluons and the other particles that make up matter and energy would actually learn something reading this. There’s an illustration of the “Standard Model” with its different flavors of quarks, neutrinos, and other particles. There’s no graviton, as we haven’t found it, but in the story the aliens (who are far advanced from us) have.
        It was an excellent read, with a lot of twists and turns and surprises. I highly recommend it. It’s free to read if you have Amazon Prime or a local library card.