Anomaly

Finished reading Anomaly yesterday and it was quite good overall. Anomaly is a budget (self published) Sci-Fi book off Amazon.

Anomaly is a story about a strange physical anomaly that turns up in the middle of New York and which turns out to be an alien artifact. The story centres on a science teacher and a reporter who inadvertently get dragged into the analysis of the artifact. The anomaly captures a large sphere of road and buildings and rotates it relative to the land around it.

The characters struggle to think through what the anomaly might be and why it manifests itself as it does. They think through how to communicate with it and what its goals for being there might be. The book also imagines what the global consequences of the anomaly might be.

I really like the way the book portrays an interesting scientific anomaly without resorting to magic but also without getting bogged down in scientific detail. I like how the main character thinks through it all just using simple logic. (Spoiler) the rainbow texta idea for instance for showing the alien the range of the human visible spectrum is great.

What bothers me is that I think there are other possibilities  that the characters could have come up with based on the evidence but magically the one they chose seems to become the next step (well mostly).

The other aspect that really bothers me is the global impact of the anomaly - the world turns to crap (riots and deaths) just because some weird alien artifact turns up? Seriously?

Yes I know my last book rant was about religion but again this author choose to portray most of the clergy as morons. He effectively sets up a few characters as the 'good cops' with a sensible world view but in order to make his point he has to create a few moronic clergymen for them to argue with. This is at best clumsy and at worst just insulting.

In the book the author deals with the issues arising from the anomaly having turned up in the US and the US controlling its exploration. That part seem very realistic to me as I can imagine the scientists of the world going nuts when they were excluded. The only part I think the book gets wrong is the belief that this situation would be acceptable or necessary.

(Spoiler) and then the aliens turn out to be some sort of galactic police that ensure no new up and coming race does damage within the galaxy. Hmm I wonder if this alien race invades planets to hunt down weapons of mass destruction too?

And I think that's what REALLY tarnishes this book for me - the nauseatingly american-centric viewpoint.

Otherwise the story trundled along and had lots of cool ideas so probably worth the $2.00 or whatever it cost.