Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559403 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Like Isabella, a giant superconducting supercollider particle accelerator, the thought-provoking new thriller from bestseller Preston (Tyrannosaur Canyon) takes a while to power up, but once it does, this baby roars. The ostensible goal of Isabella's creator, physicist Gregory North Hazelius, is to discover new forms of energy, but what he really wants is to talk to God. The project, located inside Red Mesa (a five-hundred-square-mile tableland on the Navajo Indian Reservation), is behind schedule, so presidential science adviser Stanton Lockwood hires ex-CIA man Wyman Ford to go to Red Mesa and find out what's causing the holdup. Meanwhile, a Navajo medicine man, a televangelist and a pastor who runs a failed mission on the reservation are gearing up to pull the plug on Isabella before she destroys the earth. Science has often tangled with religion in this genre, but Preston puts his own philosophical spin on the usual proceedings, and when he gets his irate villagers with their burning torches headed for the castle, the pages simply fly.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Customer Reviews

`It seems that both of our creator stories have origin problems'
The world's most powerful particle accelerator, Isabella, buried deep in an Arizona mountain is the most expensive machine ever built. The purpose of the machine is to explore what happened at the moment of creation, but there is a fear that it may suck the earth into a miniature black hole.

Against a backdrop of rising concern about the money spent, the team of 12 scientists led by Gregory North Hazelius is under increasing pressure to demonstrate the value of the project. In addition there are rising Christian fundamentalist views that the plan is a satanic attempt to disprove the book of Genesis, as well as concerns about the project by the Navajo people (on whose reservation the site is located). There seem to be problems in getting Isabella on line and Wyman Ford is implanted within the team to report back to government about what is really happening.

This novel is marketed as thriller about religion and science. It could also be marketed as an illustration of a triad of hubristic cynicism: government, science and religion all seeking to manipulate public opinion. What makes the novel work, on one level, for me is that none of the players demonstrate superiority and while each fail in different ways the end result demonstrates that nothing substantive has been learned.

I found this an interesting way to spend a few hours on a rainy afternoon: plenty of action, albeit with predictable outcomes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

There's a (holy) Ghost in the machine
Blasphemy is the story of a group of researchers at Isabella, the new US government financed $40 billion particle accelerator, located on an Arizona reservation leased from the Navajos. The main goal of the accelerator is to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, to test modern theories of the creation of the universe. When the newly completed accelerator fails to get on-line as quickly as expected, the Feds send in an operative under cover as a Navajo liaison to find out what has gone wrong. Turns out a lot has, either as the result of deliberate sabotage, a bug in the software, or something really strange. Mix in a few thousand fundamentalist Christians who view the whole thing as an attempt by anti-religious atheistic scientists to disprove the existence of God and undermine the good book, incited to a frenzied pitch by a slick televangelist huckster and a well-meaning but psychotic and delusional fundamentalist minister on the Rez, season with elements of the AntiChrist, miniature black holes and the possibility of a really large explosion, and you have all the ingredients for a suspenseful and successful potboiler.

The writing is crisp and lean and everything moves very fast. The book is hard to put down as it is very much plot-driven and paced and parsed very well, and, well, you just have to find out what happens next. Do not read this if you contributed regularly to the ministries of Jerry Falwell or Jim Baker or if you disliked the Preston-Childs collaborative novels featuring the irrepressible Agent Pendergast. On the other hand, if you have recently finished and were impressed by "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris or "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and/or their intellectual brethren, I predict you will find this novel very amusing. In spite of a hole in the plot big enough to land a 747 in (sorry - no spoilers here - if interested see my comment), this novel is great fun and highly recommended.

A Novel of "Big Ideas" that comes up short
Douglas Preston, along with his frequent collaborator, Lincoln Child, has written some of the more memorable science-based thrillers of the past decade. The novels involving their very original protaganist, FBI Agent Pendergast, usually are well plotted, expertly paced, and written with scares and some of the supernatural in mind. With Blasphemy, Preston's third major novel without Child, the ideas and the plot is there, but the pacing is weak and the story a bit much even for a Sci-fi fan like myself.

The novel centers around a former CIA-agent turned monk turned PI with the unlikely name of Wyman Ford. He is tasked by the President's Science Advisor to investigate what is happening at Isabella, the largest Superconducting Supercollider in the world, a project that the President has hung his legacy on and that has cost the US taxpayers billions of dollars. Isabella, it seems, is not working as it should, and Congress is threatening to pull funding. Unless Ford can get the team of scientists at the site to admit what the real problems are, the project may be doomed.

The Isablla project is run by the enigmatic Dr. Hazelius, a super-genius who is trying to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang so that science can learn more about the creation of the Universe, and other big scientific questions. Hazelius is probably the best written character in the novel, as all of his motivations and actions, as they are revealed, make a very good logical sense. He feels like a real person, not just like a character in the book.

The problem with Blasphemy is that Hazelius is the only really well-defined character. Ford, essentially spying on the scientists, is at first only in it for the money, but his heart changes when he discovers the ex Love of his Life is one of the chief researchers. His character acts mostly as a sounding board for the other characters to run through the philisophical and theological arguments that come up in the book.

The theological elements are also a problem. The book is trying to start a debate about how and if religion and science can coexist. The Isabella project is under verbal assault from a televangelist who feels like a cross between Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell, and who never seems like more than a cipher than a real character. He's obstensably the villian of the piece, but he's such a caricature it's hard to take him seriously or what his actions lead to seriously either, and since his actions spur the last third of the book, I found my interest in the novel waning. The religion vs. science debate is a debate worth having, but Preston makes the mistake of setting up strawman arguments for the science side to strike down, and then escallating the religious wackos into militant crazies by the final act.

There are too many threads running around and the message that Preston is sending, while noble in my eyes, is lost in the poor characterization and motivation for both the hero's and the villains. The action is well described and the book reads quickly, but I would recommend a visit to the library for this one over a purchase. Preston may have a great novel in him yet, but this is not it.