Bill DeSmedt's Singularity

   I recently completed Bill DeSmedt's first novel -- Singularity -- having received a preview copy from his agent about a month and a half ago. It wasn't an easy book to put down, but then, life tends to get in the way of even the pleasures of reading -- so it took me a bit longer to finish it. Singularity is a science fiction novel set in our times, or the very near future, with a heavier dose of science than you would normally find in the science fiction fare. The premise is a very interesting one, and it was what kept me coming back to it in the wee-hours of the night. I'll quote you from the book description:

June 30th, 1908, Tunguska --
   The most violent cosmic collision in recorded history rocks Central Siberia, decimating ancient forests across an area half the size of Rhode Island, yet leaving behind not a shred of hard evidence as to what caused it.
   What if, as some astrophysicists have theorized, the culprit was a sub-microscopic black hole, smaller than an atom, heavier than a mountain, older than the stars? What if that fantastic object is still down there, burrowing through the Earth's mantle, locked into a decaying orbit that could one day consume the entire planet? What if you could capture it, and harness its awesome power to transform the world -- or end it?
This is the premise of Bill DeSmedt's debut thriller Singularity. Hurtling from the trackless wastes of Siberia to the towers of Manhattan to the stygian depths of the North Atlantic, spanning a hundred years and a thousand miles of open ocean, Singularity is a fast-paced high-IQ science thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton and Greg Bear.

   Bill DeSmedt does a good job with the hard science of the book -- and if you're not up to speed, you may be left wondering where the real science ended and the speculation begun -- which is a good thing to get lost in the book with. There is more science in the book than just the astrophysics -- although most play an ancillary role to the premise -- a subatomic-sized black hole, created by the primordial universe, slowly devouring Earth. There's no reason why a subatomic-sized black hole couldn't be possible -- mathematically it makes sense, and it's something most students of elementary astrophysics would recognize, although the possibility is soon forgotten with the encounter of stellar black holes. Shrink anything however, small enough, and you can make a black hole -- same with wave-particle duality -- while we all know that photons are both a wave and a particle at the same time, most of us tend to forget that we too exist as both a wave and a particle. Fundamentally speaking however, a black hole is a region in spacetime where mass has collapsed to such a degree due to the gravitational force, that the escape velocity from the surface exceeds the speed of light -- and since nothing travels faster than the speed of light in our universe, without violating Special Relativity, nothing escapes from a black hole -- not even light, and hence it's called a black hole. (I had one professor in University describe this as "black holes have no hair" -- took me a while to get it, and while it makes sense, it's a stupid way of describing it. At the same time, I'll skip any discussion of tachyons here -- like a lot of things in astrophysics, this is all theory, and theories evolve.) A subatomic-sized black hole traversing the emptiness of space doesn't take much stretch of the imagination. One that plummets through the Earth however does, and it's the unlikely scenario painted by A.A. Jackson and M.P. Ryan, in their 1973 paper, to explain the Tunguska event. In the real world, the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis doesn't hold much water -- as the impact in Siberia is now generally believed to have been caused by the impact of a cometary nucleus -- and an impact by a primordial black hole should have left an exit impact somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. There is no evidence of such and exit, and that's where the speculation begins.
   What if the subatomic-sized black hole never left Earth, but is instead cruising in an orbit within the planet? And what if that orbit is decaying? Eventually the black hole will spiral into the core, where, like a vampire, it will begin to devour the planet -- because devouring matter is what black holes do. From this speculation, Vurdalak is born -- the Russian name given to the black hole in orbit within the Earth. Russians? Yup. The fiction of the book pits a top secret American agency, CROM (Critical Resource Oversight Mandate), charged with securing the brains behind the capability of producing WMDs from falling into wrong hands, against a Russian conglomerate with secret aspirations of capturing the black hole to use for their own nefarious purpose -- and what a mystery that nefarious purpose is. It's good enough to match the evil machinations of the Bond villains -- with DeSmedt even resurrecting Jaws while he was at it. The book's action would make a great movie -- a cross between the Jack Ryan and James Bond films -- the difference however is in the science content of Singularity -- delivered by an astrophysicist and a cosmologist. The mind bending implications of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and SpaceTime paradoxes would not translate well to film -- even if DeSmedt's oft-used recreational drug use analogy was employed. The action would translate great though, with heroes Jon Knox and Marianna Bonaventure -- one, the consultant with the overactive intuition, the other, the sexy but uptight CROM agent -- racing to solve the mystery of the Russians secret before they execute on their ultimate plans.
   The book is a great book, one that I would recommend for science fiction buffs. There is one thing I didn't like however -- it was character development. DeSmedt did an excellent job with the science. It was what kept me reading the book. I'm afraid however, he did the science justice at the expense of the characters -- he fell into too many clichés with them. While putting Jon Knox, a consultant/analyst with an annoying intuition, as the protagonist was different -- and I didn't always buy it -- even Jon Knox at times became the big, macho hero. Marianna Bonaventure didn't fair any better at times. The other pivotal characters were likewise ensconced in two-dimensional, clichéd presentations. DeSmedt is already at work on a sequel to Singularity -- hopefully the characters will be brought to life better -- enough so that you actually care about them. For a more heated response to DeSmedt's characters, check out this post from my very best friend.
   On a final note for this post -- I have been in email contact with Bill DeSmedt, and have invited him to post a response (or two) to my site. He has agreed to take any questions anyone out there may have -- if you have questions, click on the comment link below and post away. In the coming days, I will also be posting an email exchange I had with DeSMedt -- the exchange happened before I had read his novel and covers the science behind the novel. And on a final, final note; be sure to check out the Vurdalak Conjecture -- a site that chronicles more of the science behind the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis.