Rating: 
Summary: Should Earn Negative Stars
Review: Well, I'm not going to be all coy and stuff. Robert Metzger's science fiction novel Picoverse is wretched and vile.There are these physics people at Georgia Tech, right? This is in about 2007 in a pointlessly variant Earth where President Gore was assassinated in a visit to Cairo, but that's fairly irrelevant. So these lab types are dorking around with what they call a Sonomak, where evidently they're trying to set new records for superheating plasma. Maybe as part of some research into fusion. Anyway, as it turns out, if you manipulate all the fields to make the plasma all dense and hot and stuff, then you end up rupturing the fabric of space/time. And when you do that, you spawn a new mini-universe, or rather you create a duplicate of your own planet (with the exact same history right up to a point within a few decades of 2007, when the Sonomak fired up) in a parallel universe that is much smaller and where the time rate is different. So basically you're accidentally playing God, and a cruel one at that, 'cuz you're Xeroxing new Earths but bottling them up in picoverses that generally extend no farther than the solar system. From the viewpoint of the hapless folks in the picoverse, they're just minding their own business when one day all of the stars vanish, and they come to discover that everything beyond Pluto has irrevocably vanished. Which would sorta be annoying. Okay, this is pretty intriguing. I can see something along the lines of "Oh, no, in our ego-driven physics folly, where we tampered with things that man was not meant to know, we just whipped up a cloned Earth in a pocket universe and now we've messed up everyone there over, since they're trapped in a bottle. Let's try to fix this!" Well, Metzger decided that was far too plebeian for him. So as it turns out, this was no mistake, but rather had been planned all along by a manipulative Watcher kind of thing what has been camping out on Earth Prime for, oh, four billion years. (This is not a spoiler, since it's revealed within a few pages.) See, our universe was actually generated from a larger predecessor universe by an even bigger Sonomak by the Makers, and these here Makers are keen that we lowly humans shouldn't be larking about with ultra-physics and baking up a lot of picoverses, 'cuz inevitably trouble will result, and the picoverses will start collapsing on each other and then a cascade effect will take place and start taking down all of the big universes in a domino effect. So the Makers have dispatched these guardian entities to keep an eye on various intelligent races to keep them from pursuing certain paths of knowledge. But some rogue Maker long ago suborned our Watcher so that it is actually allowing a Sonomak to be created, 'cuz this particular Maker wants to...um...I dunno. It's not too clear. These events are actually more comprehensible as summarized in this review than as found in the novel, since these revelations come grudgingly, and when they are at last staged, it all seems goofy. Various folks are almost literally ripping off masks and saying, "Ah, you thought I was Werner von Braun, but really I am a death-droid from the Conquernaut Galaxy!" Almost no one is who they claim to be, since they turn out to be alien pawns or quasi-deities or meat puppets for computer programs or shells for possessive entities. Not only that, but Metzger never really decides who his protagonist is. It could be one of three or four people, each of whom changes dramatically in physical terms over the course of the book. I mean, by the point that some of them had become interplanetary psionic Neanderthals (and I am not making that up), I was beyond the point of caring, because it was clear that in a few pages they'd be transformed into something else. Moreover, Metzger must be an embittered post-doc in physics, because he takes pains to show that all professors and adminstrators are blithering and egotistical ignorant dolts. Also, since one of the picoverses is chugging along in the 1940s or thereabouts, we get to run into a bunch of famous physicists, all of whom are depicted as tyrannical monsters and ruthless tyrants. Take THAT, Heisenberg and Einstein! (Metzger also makes certain to deal with both of them as he sees fit.) I mean...this book is just bad. The premise had promise, but then it went lurching off into the weird zone with unnecessary complications. I haven't seen an SF novel go this abruptly and bizarrely off-track since Darwinia. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I would soon be finished and I could then angrily fling it across the room, or maybe toss it into the litter box. At least that way maybe my cat Mr. Hate would get more enjoyment out of it than I had.
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