Science Fiction: Dark Orbit By Carolyn Ives Gilman

 (Drivebycuriosity) -  I love science fiction. But I get often disappointed. Most of the so-called sci-fi books and movies tell just fantasy stories about wizards, dragons & princesses or post-apocalyptic horror stories. It became increasingly challenging to find real "science fiction", stories & novels which have science in it and are not pure fairy tales. So I am searching for hard science fiction which blends entertainment with sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, evolution and more.

I discovered Carolyn Ives Gilman because I enjoyed her idiosyncratic short story "Touring with the Alien"where a woman travels together with an alien in a near future USA (published in "The Year`s Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois” here my review ) and I indulged in her masterpiece "Umbernight". Human settlers on an inhospitable planet are hiking through unknown land to capture something they need. The hikers have to deal with a bizarre & deadly environment - a thrilling adventure story (published in "The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 4" by Neil Clarke. My review ).

These short stories drew my attention to her novel "Dark Orbit" ( amazon). Again Gilman sets an adventure story into a bizarre environment. A team of scientists are send to a space ship which orbits a newly discovered planet where they observe weird physics. The baseline and the first 50% pages are fascinating and kept me on the edge, but then author started to meander the story more and more till she lost the control. I doubt that she knew in the final what she wanted to write about. What a pity.

The early parts of the book are a felicitous mix of physics, especially cosmology, and entertainment. I enjoyed the beauty of her language: "As they orbited into day, the planet below became a shimmering mass of tinsel. The surface was a sea of reflections stirred by the wind". I loved the depiction of the weird spaceship, called "Escher" (named after the surrealist images by M.C.Escher),  and indulged into her wonderful description of quantum physical phenomena:
“The physicist spoke as if they had created two entangled particles, born and split in the same instant, that continued to influence one another across whatever distance separated them. But in fact, it might be that they had only separated two aspects of the same particle, existing simultaneously in two spots, and resonating back and forth. To detect the particles directly would destroy the effect by freezing them into existence in one spot. Until then, they had only potential existence in both spot. In this unresolved state it was possible to use them to communicate by observing their indirect effects on the magnetic field mourned them. But the magnetic bottle was like Pandora´s box - a thing they were forbidden to peak in for fear it would make their particles real”. This is the most poetic writing about the weirdness of quantum physics I have ever read. Stephen Hawkins meets Arthur C. Clark.

Later she focused on the discovered planet,  apparently influenced by her professional experience as historian who works as a curator of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.. Unfortunately she tried to blend anthropology with quantum physics which lead to an inedible mixture. Humans - and their environment - appeared and disappeared like some atomic particles.

Apparently Gilman`s strengths lies more in are writing short stories - and  maybe novellas.