Collapsium

In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, three commodities rule the day: wellstone, collapsium, and the bitter rivalry between Her Majesty's top scientists. Bruno de Towaji dreams of building an arc de fin, while Marlon Sykes is hard at work on a telecommunications project. When a saboteur attacks the Ring Collapsiter and sends it falling into the sun, the two scientists must put aside their personal animosity and combine their prodigious intellects to prevent the destruction of the solar system.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 09 March 2020
Publisher: Baen Books

In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, three commodities reign supreme. The first is wellstone, a form of programmable matter capable of emulating almost any substance: natural, artificial, even hypothetical. The second is collapsium, a deadly crystal composed of miniature black holes, vital for the transmission of information and matter — including humans — throughout the solar system. The third is the bitter rivalry between Her Majesty's top scientists. Bruno de Towaji, famed lover and statesman, dreams of building an arc de fin, an almost mythical device capable of probing the farthest reaches of spacetime. Marlon Sykes, de Towaji's rival in both love and science, is meanwhile hard at work on a vast telecommunications project whose first step is the construction of a ring of collapsium around the sun. But when a ruthless saboteur attacks the Ring Collapsiter and sends it falling into the sun, the two scientists must put aside personal animosity and combine their prodigious intellects to prevent the destruction of the solar system and every living thing within it.

The Collapsium: "Ingenious and witty . . . as if Terry Pratchett at his zaniest and Larry Niven at his best had collaborated." — Booklist Fresh and imaginative. From a plausible yet startling invention, McCarthy follows the logical lines of sight, building in parallel the technological and societal innovations. Our Pick. I wanted to visit this Queendom and meet these people. — Science Fiction Weekly The future as McCarthy sees it is a wondrous place. While there are amusing attributes and quirks to McCarthy's characters, the greater pleasures of this novel lie in its hard science extrapolations. McCarthy plays us his technical strengths by providing a useful appendix and glossary for the mathematical.

Weight: 458g
Dimension: 156 x 233 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781982124496