Dark as Day [Mass Market Paperback]

Reluctantly involved in their plot is Alex Ligon, sort of the black sheep of the family. When not being bullied by his family into running errands -- or auditioning for arranged marriages -- he works for the government rather than Ligon Industries. He's proud of a vast, sophisticated computer model of the entirety of human civilization in the solar system -- until it shows mankind going extinct in less than a century. Bad modelling or a ominous and valid warning?

Meanwhile, young Millie Wu has signed on to work for one half of the Beston brothers -- aka the Bastard and the Ogre, SETI researchers whose obsession about finding alien signals is matched only by their obsession with besting each other. Wu can't quite believe her luck when she seems to have detected a genuine signal.

On Earth, Janeed Jannex and her childhood friend Sebastian Birch decide to emigrate to space, but their recruiters prove to surprisingly be interested in Birch's almost idiot savant fascination with, of all things, clouds.

Those familiar with Sheffield's previous work will expect these plotlines to converge, and, as with _Cold As Ice_, the surprises are less in the sometimes predictable plot twists than the why of events or their scientific explanation. Those who found the ideas of that novel interesting will also appreciate this one. Sheffield gives us a system wide internet, the Seine, that communicates instantaneously via quantum entanglement. There is the mining of methane deposits on the floors of Earth's oceans, and a fairly detailed explanation of how an alien radio signal would be analysed and decoded. Even if Sheffield engages in a bit of handwaving with his explanations of Alex Ligon's computer model, it is still interesting.

Readers new to this series should have no trouble jumping right in with this book, and those who have read the other two novels will find little amplifications of previous plots points -- including Bat's growing collection of weapons from the Great War.

I already miss Charles Sheffield, just because the prospects of more novels featuring the unique "Bat" are remote. Sheffield wrote the very hardest SF (as appropriate for a Ph.D. in physics), but he usually managed to tell a good story as well - something that most of the other physicists who have written SF haven't managed to do. I wish he could have lived and written for another 20 years.

I wish to defend the instantaneous communication system a previous reviewer has maligned. Sheffield quite explicitly states that it works because of quantum entanglement, a perfectly respectable theory which was discussed in Scientific American's special edition last year on cosmology and cosmogony.

If you want to find some good reading, and are willing to accept his (very) rare failures, pick up some of his older novels, many of which were published in Analog before coming into the bookstores.