/lit/ - Literature

>>9153019

I admit being fuzzy on why there was an outpost on the comet but in some fashion they have found a way to enter Sol's corona and are attempting to hide from the aliens there. This occurs early in the novel which I found quite disconcerting as venturing into stars doesn't seem like something a race of neophyte spacefarers would be capable of doing. Anyhoo, the aliens end up finding them but stand off in a higher orbit and begin tossing antimatter bombs down through a path they intermittently clear through the starstuff. The cometriders counter by hucking some sort of implosion bombs that cancel the antimatter bombs. Eventually the cometriders decide they will run out of bombs before the aliens do and decide to launch all of theirs at once. They do so and succeed in driving off the aliens although the combined effect of the implosions nearly halts solar fusion. The cometriders now must decide whether to attempt to kill Sol deliberately or not.

The submarine survivors are eventually detected and are hoisted up, submarine and all, from the surface of the Atlantic Ocean into an alien spacecraft. There they have conversations with an octopus-like alien, who eventually reveals that their race is subservient to an AI. Not much else is revealed here with the rest of the story focused on the Jesuit submarine captain coming to the brink of embracing atheism while her crewmate decides to rebuild his Titanic simulation and live in VR.

The novel closes with the religious sect on the way to a nearby brown dwarf star where they intend to hide. Behind them, Sol has flared into nova and will exterminate everything inside the Oort cloud. Jesus/Joshua becomes angry and focused on the survival of humanity for eventual revenge.

The novel is peppered with Old Testament or Talmudic references, often by the characters themselves who are described as irreligious. I considered this odd so I googled the two writers. George Zebrowski is Jewish and has written other scifi with Jewish themes. Pellegrino is more enigmatic; he appears to be something of a disgraced charlatan who faked a PhD and had a 2010 book pulled from print because of falsified claims. He has also been an intimate of James Cameron's, which would explain the otherwise bizarre appearance of the Titanic in this novel. There are also numerous Star Trek: TNG references throughout the novel but I have no working theory as to why. The afterword of the novel appears devoted to listing all of the exclusive claims and predictions of the authors and reads like a pathetic resume of lives wasted.

Anon-kun from the last thread, I would advise you not to spend the $20+ for a used copy of this book.