Blasphemy

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 416 pages
• Published by: Forge Books
• Edition: 1st Edition January 8, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0765311054
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0765311054
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Two wise decisions move this thriller up from the ranks of the ordinary: Scott Sowers's reading and a bonus interview with Preston by the editor-in-chief of Scientific American. Sowers, who has read Preston's work in the past with impressive results, adds a needed degree of calm and charm to this tangled tale of a giant superconducting supercollider particle accelerator called Isabella, located inside a 500-acre mesa on a Navajo reservation. Sowers gives all the characters instant credibility, from the physicist who created Isabella, to the ex-CIA man sent by the president to see what's taking so long, and especially a powerful televangelist who sees the project as blasphemy. In the interview, Preston admits he got the idea from the late L. Ron Hubbard. Sowers and Preston make this confrontation between religion and science surprisingly smart and new.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From AudioFile
Whether it's scientists, CIA agents, greedy politicos, religious fanatics, or entire towns of Navaho Indians--somehow Scott Sowers juggles them all, making what could have been a chaotic story exciting as well as comprehensible. It's easy to go back over the printed page, not so easy if you're driving and listening. Listeners are in exceedingly capable hands--Sowers never lets us down. He weaves together the complex subplots of what happens when science and religion collide. The scientists out on the Red Mesa desert thought they were inventing a particle collider that would allow them to look back into the Big Bang. What they weren't expecting to find was God. D.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Reader Reviews
Douglas Preston has really been on a roll with his last two solo novels. In "Tyrannosaur Canyon" he has this theory about how the dinosaurs had died...and then he proceeded to restate it a dozen times throughout the story to the point where it actually eclipsed anything happening in the book. In "Blasphemy", he suddenly gives us a glimpse into his theory of science as God. We are treated to pages-long tirades about how faith and science cannot co-exist, one must destroy the other. About how science is the true religion and God has never spoken to man before. The villains of the story are Christians...but not like any you've ever met in real life. They are melodramatic caricatures of the real thing. They somehow manage to form a killing mob in the middle of the desert two hours after an email goes out...so ridiculously unrealistic I can't see how this made it past any sane editor. Christians will ignore every other End-Times prophecy in the world, but when a lone pastor in a tiny mission writes them about this dangerous new thing called a "kohm-pew-tur" using something called "ee-leck-tri-sit-ee" and how this has to be the Anti-Christ, they come out in droves to kill the demon machine and its creator? Yeah, that's realistic. And the ramblings of Isabella/whoever sound honestly like a physicist on an LSD trip just chattering away at every freaky theory he's ever had in his life. And yes, I got the little twist at the end that's supposed to explain the machine, but that still doesn't excuse the flat characters and ridiculously over-the-top plot. When Ford is in the control room looking at the faces of these stoic atheist scientists who are suddenly becoming converted by this computer, it's like something out of a bad movie. They ridicule the "crutch" of religion throughout the story, but then wholly embrace their own version of it without batting an eye later? Sure. I think Preston really needs to treat Lincoln Child well, because it appears Child is the one in the writing duo who keeps the Pendergast stories sane and interesting. It's really a shame that his solo work has gone so downhill lately, because I thought "The Codex" was amazing. Hopefully Preston will approach his next solo novel with the idea to tell a good story, not write a scientific theory with a few characters thrown in to call it a novel.