Bowl of Heaven : A Novel

from nmele

Initially, I was hesitant to read this one because, as a diagram in the book makes clear, it sure seems like a bigger, newer Ringworld novel; as I read,though, Benford's and Niven's plot in particular recalled a very different series, Harry Harrison's "West of Eden" trilogy. Except, of course, th...

from TempleCat

I liked Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. I grew up on Asimov and Clarke, Kornbluth and Simak and Pohl, and Bowl of Heaven is very much like the stories those guys wrote - take a big idea and let a group of scrappy humans figure out how to build it or figure out what it does and...

from rondoctor

30 pages into this book and I almost gave up on it ... slow, incomprehensible ... but kept going. Benford and Niven are good scifi authors so I kept going as a matter of faith. By around 60 pages in, the writing improved and the plotline began to make sense. From there on the story became engagin...

from JohnFair

Written by Niven and Benford, you are looking at the top tier of hard science fiction authorship here, and the book ticks all the required item; a slow sleeper ship, using a ramscoop and taking a colony out to a star thought to have life bearing planets runs into an unexpected object - not a trad...

from speljamr

The book sets the story in a quasi Dyson sphere (only 1/2 of a sphere) with lots of different aliens and eco-systems. The science explored here ranges from realistic interstellar flight to evolution and brain science. While the story has plenty of strange aliens, the use of these aliens in the st...