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Against Infinity
by Gregory Benford
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Pocket (1984-03-01)
ISBN: 0671459015
EAN: 9780671459017
Paperback: 215 pages
SKU: 8393
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Binding: Softcover. Condition: Very Good. Slightly Creased Spine.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
A gripping, masterfully written adventure set against the violent beauty of a planet in the throes of cataclymic transformation, Against Infinity is Gregory Benford's timeless portrait of a young man's comming of age. On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt.Their prey is the Aleph--an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men's dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now in a modern world ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe. On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a hunt for the Aleph--an alien artifact that ruled Ganymede for countless millenia, Infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men's dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into an habitable planet. Now an ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.
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Customer Reviews
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Not so good
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-02-12
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Ganymede is a frozen wasteland, covered completely in solid ammonia and hiding a handful of strange alien artifacts. Mankind sets up small domes with buildings underneath to fight off the cold, while using genetically-engineered critters to do some terraforming. The main character's father organizes expeditions to kill off 'muties' - mutated versions of the critters that are hindering the terraforming project. The story is a coming-of-age tale about the boy Manuel, his relationship with his father, society, and mentor Old Matt, and it's got a moral about man's place in Nature.
The most imposing artifact of all is of course the gigantic Aleph. It's a huge 'creature' made of stone that tunnels through the ice and plows through mountains with no regard for anything in its path - including the human settlements. The men occasionally attempt to hunt it but find their weapons largely ineffective and the pursuit is both dangerous and difficult. Manuel eventually sets off to kill the thing, so the story follows his exploits.
Unfortunately, I found the book very flat and boring. Basically, Benford is trying to write a frontiersman story in space. He hasn't made it believable, though. For example, these men are basically living in a world of hyper-advanced medical technology (that can resurrect people who had frozen to death or replace body parts with robotic equivalents), but everything else is antiquated (radios that hardly work despite overhead satellites, a severe lack of seismic monitoring equipment, few computers, etc).
So Benford has placed men on Ganymede and given them weapons and targets and written half a book about hunting. The other half is completely different and Benford gets a chance to expand on his political views through really contrived situations. It's so transparent it's almost laughable. Finally the boy is forced to have a confrontation with his past, which is very badly done and ties up very little. Who were all those extra characters at the end? Why is Manuel so one-dimensional?
The Aleph itself is the only thing that kept me hooked. Towards the end I kept waiting for the explanation (which of course was certain to come, as Manuel kept hitting conveniently-placed-coincidence after conveniently-placed-coincidence pushing him onward). And the idea behind the Aleph itself was really cool, but it's presented in a really uninspiring way by an extraneous character - who showed up out of nowhere way late in the book. It left too many questions unanswered about the Aleph and what kind of influence Man was or was not able to effect on it. What in the hell is it doing on Ganymede, anyway?
In short I found the first half much more interesting than the last, and that's not saying much. I didn't particularly care for the characters or the repeated descriptions of how Manuel had no idea what was going on, Old Matt knew way too much, and Eagle yet again showed his independence. The ending was weak, the moral poorly presented, and unless you're a big fan of sentences like "The men whooped as they pursued their quarry across the frozen wasteland" stay far away.
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Not Free SF Reader
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-09-25
A is for alien to be hunted.
The writing in this book is a bit of a different style, a little more old fashioned feeling compared to a lot of his other work. On a tough, hard to survive on icy moon an alien force lies buried. When the locals realise something is stirring again, a boy and his father take on the task of doing something about it, if life wasn't rough enough for them to start with. This leads to some revelations for those involved.
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Sci-Fi boomtown.
Rating (3)
Date: 2006-05-15
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
It's a good layover book, and a decent attempt to transcend sci-fi by addressing crusty themes with new raw material. The aleph is a Macguffin on par with the spice worms, but there's nothing epic about this coming of age novel.
If you read it, try to spot the scene 'borrowed' from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast."
Interesting political commentary and explanation of capitalism; that is, if you feel socialism is the ultimate human state of equilibrium.
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Tragedy on Ganymede
Rating  (5)
Date: 2004-07-17
The book explores man's tendency to do evil, but also his ability to resist it while resigning himself to its permanence; in this way it reaches to the level of a great tragedy. But it's also science fiction, of course, and the book explores Ganymede, where settlers contend with various hardships and hunt overly populous animals genetically engineered and brought along to drink liquid ammonia on the moon, and where they must always try to avoid the constantly churning aleph, an age-old and impossible to describe device left by aliens to wander Ganymede forever. The reader finds himself contemplating the settlement of our solar system, the symbolism of the aleph (ruthless, brutal nature?), and the array of moral characters in the book."Against Infinity," indeed. The book shows what we are up against: infinite, brutal nature and permanent evil. In the book's central character, it shows a way to respond to these forces that is worth taking.
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Deserves a more perceptive look
Rating (3)
Date: 2003-01-30
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This certainly isn't Gregory Benford's best book, nor is it one which I can recommend, at least not without qualification.The concept is good, and the basic setting is interesting. The combination of a coming-of-age plot in a science-fictional setting is interesting and workable. The issues brought forth here are befitting both genres, those having to do with feeling and respect towards life, even life as remote from our experience as Aleph is shown. And Aleph alone is a worthy concept, the idea of life that exists for no apparant reason than to survive, that has no interest in anything that doesn't sustain that life and being. And of course, there is Benford's familiar theme, that of man attempting to bend all he encounters to his purposes. There's some real meat here, but somehow, it just isn't clothed in a sustainedly entertaining mode.
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