Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

Overview

“A swift, gripping novel with a goose-pimple mix of scary science and near-future action.” —Greg Bear, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of The Unfinished Land
 
June 30th, 1908—In Siberia’s remote Tunguska river basin, the most devastating cosmic collision ever recorded flattens hundreds of square miles with a blast a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet, more than a hundred years later, the cause of the cataclysm remains shrouded in mystery.

Maverick astrophysicist Jack Adler thinks he’s figured it out: a submicroscopic black hole, smaller than an atom, more massive than a mountain, made impact with the earth. Jack believes that this fantastic object is still deep inside the Earth, burrowing through its mantle in an orbit that will end only when it has devoured the entire planet. Meanwhile, secret agent Marianna Bonaventure enlists the help of Jonathan Knox, an analyst with an uncanny ability to find hidden relationships between seemingly disparate people and events, to search for three missing scientists and infiltrate the floating headquarters of a Russian industrialist. Together, these three must battle a global conspiracy intent upon exploiting the awesome power of the back hole--a power that can transform the world—or end it.
 
“A swift, gripping novel with a goose-pimple mix of scary science and near-future action” —Greg Bear, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of The Unfinished Land
 
“An action-packed thriller into perilous realms of black hole physics.” —David Brin, New York Times–bestselling, Hugo & Nebula Award–winning author of Colony High

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781614756262
Publisher:	WordFire Press
Publication date:	07/06/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	456
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Bill DeSmedt has worked as a computer programmer, a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and a Soviet area expert. He lives in Milford, Pennsylvania.

What People are Saying About This

Kip Thorne

"Bill [DeSmedt] got the vast majority of the physics right, which is highly unusual - especially in a book that is such a good read."
—national bestselling author of Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

GREG BEAR

Singularity is a swift, gripping novel with a goose-pimple mix of scary science and near-future action. An excellent debut from Bill DeSmedt - and I'll be looking forward to his next one!
—New York Times bestselling author; Hugo & Nebula award winner

Anthony Olcott

"Singularity is a three-bag homer of a book - a mind-bending technothriller set on the edge of tomorrow, an East-West political thriller chilling enough to refreeze the Cold War, and an old fashioned pageturner, of the sort you can't decide whether to zip through, for the excitement, or to read slowly, to savor."
—Edgar- and Silver Dagger Award nominee

DAVID BRIN

DeSmedt veers an action-packed thriller into perilous realms of black hole physics. The combination of adrenaline and intellect sizzles.
—New York Times bestselling author; Hugo & Nebula award winner

KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Singularity juggles Clancy, Crichton, and The Da Vinci Code. An innovative concept for an end-of-the-world thriller, with convincing research and locomotive pacing.
—New York Times bestselling author

Interviews

Explorations Interview with Bill DeSmedt

Paul Goat Allen: Bill, what was the motivation behind writing a novel like Singularity?

Bill DeSmedt: It's all Carl Sagan's fault! Several summers back, I was sitting around on a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a rerun of Cosmos, Episode IV, "Heaven and Hell." That's the one where Carl talks about meteor and cometary impacts. So, midway through, Carl gets around to the Tunguska Event -- a still-unexplained impact that wiped out an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island. And from there, he goes on to the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: that the Event was a collision between Earth and an atom-sized black hole. And then he's refuting J&R, citing the standard missing exit-event objection -- namely, that the mini black hole should have cut through the solid body of the earth like a knife through morning mist and come exploding up out of the North Atlantic an hour later, wreaking all manner of havoc. Never happened. And, next thing you know Carl's gone on to Meteor Crater in Arizona or some such, leaving me sitting there, staring off into space.

"But, Carl," I said, "What if the damn thing never came out?" Little did I know it at the moment, but I'd just been hooked. I wanted to see where things went from there. In my effort to find out, I tried giving the idea away to the few published authors I could reach, hoping one of them would write the book so I could read it. No takers. "Great concept," they'd say, "but I wouldn't know where to start with the science." Finally it dawned on me that the only way I was ever going to find out how that book came out in the end was if I wrote it myself. So, with more than a little trepidation, that's what I did.

PGA: So has a consensus been reached about what really caused the Tunguska Event?

BD: If you're asking whether some theories are more popular than others, I'd have to say, yes -- that, over the past few decades, a consensus has grown up around the proposition that Tunguska was either an asteroid strike or a cometary impact. But, fashionable as they may be, those two hypotheses can't both be right. And science isn't supposed to be a popularity contest anyway. (Good thing, too, or we might still be saddled with Ptolemaic astronomy and the phlogiston theory of combustion and élan vital and the luminiferous aether -- all of which were pretty popular ideas in their day.) So, maybe a better way to ask it is: Is there a preponderance of evidence in favor of any one theory? And there I'd have to answer: Not that I've seen so far. The problem with the leading contenders is that the asteroid advocates have leveled some pretty damning arguments against the cometary hypothesis, and the comet theorists have given back as good as they got.

But, to make that long story short, neither the cometary nor the asteroidal explanation seems able to account for all the observed Tunguska phenomena. In fact, the best thing they've got going for them is that no viable third alternative has emerged -- yet.

PGA: After reading your novel, I was struck by how much Singularity reminded me of hard science fiction stories by authors that I loved to read while growing up -- Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, et al. Do any science fiction authors -- or science fiction novels -- stand out in your mind as inspirational?

BD: First of all, let me say I'm profoundly honored -- and humbled -- to be mentioned in the same breath with the giants of the field. Most of the writers you name were my favorites when I was growing up, too. In terms of influences and inspirations, I'd even add a few more: Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, James Blish, Michael Crichton, Vernor Vinge, and Roger Zelazny. Oh, and Ray Bradbury's "Night Meeting" from his Martian Chronicles, which I chanced to read in Russian translation before I ever encountered the original English but which spoke to me across that linguistic divide, just as its characters speak across gulfs of time and space. If Damon Knight is right about the core of the science fiction experience being a "sense of wonder," then that little story has remained my touchstone for the feeling all down the years.

PGA: At the conclusion of Singularity, there was mention of a sequel in the works, entitled Dualism. Can you give readers a hint about what transpires in the next novel?

BD: Well, it's early to be disclosing plot details, but thematically Dualism will (as the title implies) explore Descartes's mind/body dichotomy filtered through the prism of near-future developments in artificial intelligence and quantum computation. It'll feature Jonathan Knox and Marianna Bonaventure, too -- turns out I'm not through with them yet, nor they with me. And (as the title also implies) Dualism will be exploring the next move in the dialectic of their relationship as well.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
Reminiscent of novels by science fiction masters like Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov -- authors who based their stories on hard science -- Bill DeSmedt's debut novel, Singularity, is an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that revolves around a submicroscopic black hole in a decaying orbit deep inside the Earth's mantle that will persist until it has devoured the entire planet!

The story begins on June 30, 1908, in a remote Siberian area known as the Stony Tunguska Basin. There, something crashes into Earth and topples forests over an area half the size of Rhode Island. Was it part of a comet? An alien spacecraft? A solar plasmoid released from the sun? After nearly a century of conjecture, it remains the "cosmic mystery of the millennium."

But Jack Adler, an American astrophysicist, thinks he has it all figured out. Furthering a much-ridiculed 1973 theory known as the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis, which supposes that a black hole -- smaller than an atom and heavier than a mountain -- was responsible for the Tungaska Event, Adler believes the black hole didn't exit the planet as Jackson and Ryan surmised but remained inside Earth. Meanwhile, rookie government agent Marianne Bonaventure and an unassuming analyst, Jon Knox, are thrown together as they try to figure out why a powerful Russian industrialist is secretly gathering scientists and spending billions on alleged WMD research.

With a cast of engaging characters, highly inventive and witty prose, and enough intriguing plot twists to keep readers in a state of perpetual shock until the very last page, Singularity is easily as entertaining as any Michael Crichton or Greg Bear thriller. Equal parts hard science fiction adventure and mainstream technothriller, Singularity is arguably one of the best debuts of 2004. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com

DeSmedt's debut SF thriller, a brisk Michael Crichton clone, vividly depicts the Tunguska event that leveled a big patch of Siberia in 1908, then shifts to the near-future, where warrior woman Marianna Bonaventure is working for CROM (Critical Resources Oversight Mandate), the U.S. Department of Energy's branch for dealing with loose WMD talent. Meanwhile, in Siberia, scientist Jack Adler discovers that Tunguska was actually hit by a microscopic black hole, not a meteorite. Marianna and an intuitive analyst, Jonathan Knox, are assigned to infiltrate the gigantic yacht Rusalka, owned by the Russian billionaire Arkady Grishin, who is on the trail of something odd. It turns out that Grishin is not who he seems and his motives for finding the Tunguska object are a great deal more sinister than anyone had supposed. The book bounces along, from well-developed scenes to lesser ones and back again, with a good deal of deft if not particularly original characterization. The sexual chemistry between Marianna and Jonathan adds spice. Exotic hardware, lifestyles of the rich and notorious, double- and triple-crosses and a slightly rushed and facile conclusion all make a respectable if not outstanding first effort. Agent, Jake Elwell at Wieser & Elwell. (Nov. 8) Forecast: A $25,000 promo budget, a blurb from Craig Bear and an 11-city author tour should ensure respectable sales. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly