Really enjoyed this book. Took some getting into but then I was hooked.
I have talked about it to my other half who loves this kind of book too and he's interested in reading it.
I disadvantaged myself by only reading it on my phone, I will be purchasing a physical copy for my other half

Gregory Benford is an accomplished, seasoned writer and as usual, he offers a treasure trove of fascinating ideas. In this novel, set two centuries from now, humans have set up a base on the Moon to house a SETI library whose mission is to decipher and comprehend the many Messages received from space. As Benford points out, the immense distances involved would almost certainly mean that these civilizations are now long since extinct. So why would they broadcast Messages for a future intelligent race to receive? As a record for posterity, a boast of their prowess, a plea for help? What about the alien AIs, who have aggressive agendas of their own? Fascinating possibilities abound!

The story begins when Ruth, a trainee Librarian, is accepted into the program, her work is to analyze Message texts and eventually converse with the AIs. She finds her feet in the byzantine hierarchy of the library, makes friends and discovers romance, and embarks on studying the Messages and interacting with the alien AIs.
After Ruth’s initial integration into the Library culture and her first few AI encounters, the book loses much of its forward momentum and takes on an episodic quality. To be sure, there are occasional references to earlier events—for example, a present-day alien race seeks her out because of her role in deflecting an existential threat to Earth, a result of her bargain with one of those AIs. I kept looking for a sense of rising tension, the inexorable progression of one crisis building to an even greater one, and not finding it.

Eventually, I gave up. The book is really long, and I kept having the experience of beginning again. Information that is usually presented near the beginning of a novel appeared a third or a half through. This circling back to “Go” reminded me of television programs of the 1950s and early 1960s, where episodes could be shown in any order because no matter what happened, all the characters and pieces ended up right where they started. (In contrast, programs of the 1970s and later tended to have story arcs that lasted several episodes, and then Babylon 5 blew them all out of the water with a five-year story arc.) Upon reflection, if the book had been presented as, “These are the ongoing adventures of Ruth, Librarian to Alien Cultures,” my expectations would have been more in line with my experience.

All that said, Benford is a highly-skilled writer, and many readers will relish the length and slow build of this novel, as well as the richness of the ideas.

I appreciate having had an opportunity to read and review this book. The appeal of this particular book was not evident to me, and if I cannot file a generally positive review, I prefer simply to advise the publisher to that effect and file no review at all.

This book kept me on my toes. The premise is so interesting, once I got into the rhythm of the writing, I could not put the book down.

I’m always up to visit the works of well established authors in the genre. Most of the time, I end up reading their newer work because it’s more relevant. So when a book is touted as being the return of an award winning author, my ears perk up and my nose picks up the scent of new prey, UwU. Unfortunately, this time the trail led me astray, and I found myself wanting. The Shadows of Eternity, by Gregory Benford, is a squandering of potential that spends more time trying to find a point than make one.

The book is a series of stories that follows the life of Rachel, as she pursues her career as a librarian at a large SETI station on the moon. Here, massive amounts of data from far flung intelligent civilizations are compiled and given to AI personalities that serve as avatars for those civilizations. Rachel’s job is to communicate and bargain with these AIs to break their code and gain knowledge that is helpful to humanity. Over the course of decades Ruth solves several puzzles while dealing with several AI and the civilizations they are compiled from. However, she ends up being visited by a trailer from another star and becomes his primary envoy for the human race. And right now you are probably thinking, “How could a book with such a good premise go wrong?”

From a technical standpoint, the book isn’t bad nor is it good. Benford does a decent job of describing bigger technical things in easy to consume ways. The characters are bland but not the worst I’ve seen. They’re there to move the story along. Rachel is just a woman with something to prove, no matter how often we’re told she’s becoming a prodigy among librarians. The dialogue is clunky and expositional without revealing anything about the characters. Every detail is told. Even when Benford decides to show, it feels like he doesn’t trust the reader, and goes out of his way to highlight it by spelling it out again in dialogue.

The story itself is meandering, and the more interesting beginning stories just feel like stepping stones to the larger, less potent narrative. In the first story in the book, Rachel takes on one of the most enigmatic of these machines, having spent her life up until this point preparing to interact with it. She gets it to open up fairly quickly, and without much effort on her part. The book follows this sort of rhythm as Rachel runs into a wall with successive machines, eventually finding a way to break through. That is until she is visited by a traveler from another race, something that has never happened before in human history. And from there on, the rest of the book becomes an ongoing quest for bigger and greater technological advances hidden under the veneer of “building relationships.” It’s a boring slog that treads the burial grounds of science fiction.

Where the book really struggles for me is it’s sexual politics. Rachel makes headway with the first AI not through her own ingenuity and understanding, but because she is essentially raped by the machine. It sees it as a quid quo pro transaction that rewards her with status and humanity with astounding technology to stick around for a while longer. I had issues with this because it’s sort of just hand waved away without acknowledgment. It could have been a “at the mercy of Gods” moment, but it’s just a thing that happens. Rachel is also written like a golden age sci fi masculine hero, thinking often about the men she wants to have sex with, and occasionally has the sex, then walks away without emotional attachment. She even fantasizes about a sexual relationship with an alien species. Now this wouldn’t be bad if it truly felt liberating, intimate, or even a character flaw. Instead, it feels vindictive as if to say “see, women can be powerful and treat the world as a sex object too” vibe.

That’s not even to get into the sexless Noughts, a third gender “created” to be logical and non-emotional rational beings to serve the library. There are a lot of issues with them, but the most fascinating one is their complete lack of understanding of or willingness to understand sex and gender relations. I’m not saying that they should per se, but Benford spends little to no effort on why they would or wouldn’t, it’s just a fact of their nature. They view her rape as a necessary stepping stone and that she should just get over it, so she does. There are plenty of other situations in which they look down on Rachel and struggles she faces due to her sex and gender, but I’m going to avoid them to say it’s all just a mess.

The worst part about going through all of this book, is that none of this seems to serve a point. Benford seems fundamentally uninterested in the world he has created, forsaking my curiosity as the reader. The Shadows of Eternity doesn’t really end anywhere. It builds and builds to pivotal moments that are just another thing-a-ma-bob. Hell the book ends with Rachel looking back and being like “haters gonna hate,” and it’s just tiring. There is not a lot redeeming about this book other than the central premise of the library itself. I wish there was more of it, and it’s a shame that this is just a chronicle of ideas from the past, packaged to look like the future.

Rating: The Shadows of Eternity 3.0/10
-Alex

I received an ARC of this through netgalley and it’s the first ARC that I just couldn’t finish. Two dimensional characters, a jumpy storyline and sexual assaults that no one, including the main character, seemed to think were wrong just turned me off. DNF

Shadows of Eternity by Gregory Benford is a highly recommended science fiction novel set two centuries in the future and spanning decades.

"Humanity has established a SETI library on the moon to decipher and interpret the many messages from alien societies we have discovered. The most intriguing messages are from complete artificial intelligences... Ruth, a beginner Librarian, must talk to alien minds—who have aggressive agendas of their own." Important: read the post-script, which shares discussions between Benford and Poul Anderson, before the novel as it will provide background information for the actual plot. Also, keep in mind that the format is a collection of short stories rather than a continuous novel.

What I wanted was a hard science fiction space opera following Ruth's work within the SETI library on the moon, discoveries, and subsequent travels, and Benford provided this. The actual format of Shadows of Eternity, however, was a bit of a surprise. It is really a series of short stories following Ruth's start as a Librarian, showcasing some of her subsequent work with alien messages, and then the main encounter that is still broken into shorter stories. The stories are all revolve around Ruth and the SETI library (until the last one), but, as with any novel that is told in this manner, characters are left behind and story lines are left without a resolution.

This disjointed flow of the novel represented in the collection of stories, rather than an ongoing space saga, is part of what I really didn't want. Additionally, the character of Ruth was not all that appealing and I don't think Benford's writing in the voice of a female main character was entirely successful or believable here. There were several scenes and actions that were off-putting and really added nothing to the plot. The latter stories in the novel were more interesting, but as a whole this was an uneven novel. Benford has been a favorite novelist for years. While Shadows of Eternity showcased many of the reasons why, it needed some more editing or a firmer direction and separation of parts. 3.5 rounded up

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Gallery/Saga Press via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Edelweiss, Google Books, and Amazon.

As much as I enjoyed the story and the subplots I didn't like this book.
The world building is excellent, the plot flows but the sexism was a bit too much
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I tried, I tried once, I tried twice, the third time I gave up. This has an interesting premise- Rachel is a librarian in the SETI library on the moon- but I found it both confusing and offensive at the same time I DNF. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm sure there's an audience for this but it's a pass from me.

5'5/10
What a pity. It is very varied and entertaining for a while, and the speculative part is very interesting, with some brilliant moments, but how the different episodes are put together and how the protagonist's personal life is narrated is, frankly, a disaster. It is a mixture of many very interesting and tasty ingredients, but it ends up in a bland and without grace.

This was not one of my new favs. It was nit a bad book. It just was not for me. Some of the events were intriguing but I felt kind of lost.

Overall, I really enjoyed Shadows of Eternity. This is probably the only time I will ever say this but, this book would have greatly benefited from being turned into a series.. The story is told over decades and beyond.

I loved the concepts, SETI library on the moon, first contact, wormholes, this book has them all and then some. Ruth, the main character is a librarian trainee. She is there to study the messages gathered over the years by SETI. Most of these messages are in the form of an AI that interacts with the librarian. The librarian uses a pod that enables them to take in the experiences with all their senses.

My only real complaint is that the author should really talk to some actual women. The sex and sexuality was was just bad. The Noughts are always referred to as he/him and the main character is weirdly obsessed with her periods. Trust me, no woman thinks of her periods that much. For me, this ruined the flow of the book, no pun intended,

I will be looking for more from this author, despite these issues because the concepts were truly wonderful.

It should be obvious by now that while I’m very much into science fiction, I’m more a space opera person than hard scifi. Gadgets and gizmos are cool, but I care mostly about the characters. Unfortunately, despite the blurb (a SETI library on the moon?!?) this book is the exact opposite of what I like.

The Library on the Moon is a collection of alien AIs, referred to as Minds, and Messages, SETI communications. Ruth, newly arrived from Earth, wins a place training to become one of the Librarians responsible for interpreting those alien messages. Over the course of a series of loosely interconnected stories, Ruth explores the edges of alien intelligence – and the universe.

Let’s just start out with my main issue. Ruth is utterly boring and suffers from the worst sort of man-writing-woman cringiness. I should’ve been prepared for this, as very early on she waxes nostalgic about reading Bradbury (ok) and Heinlein, which, oh boy, yeah, that certainly puts into perspective where this particular portrayal of women is coming from. She has a roommate/friend who is basically a caricature of drunk party girl, and a few reoccurring flings. Which, I mean, get it, girl, but maybe you shouldn’t bone the lawyer who’s there to basically pressgang you? There’s frequent references to putting off a serious relationship (and children) until her career is more established (in the future, periods can be slowed down to extend fertility). Perfectly reasonable, except it’s repeated, almost word for word, several times over the course of the book. And the one time she gets her period in the book, she acts irrationally and gets weirdly emotional. I have literally no idea what purpose that section served, except that perhaps it was meant as humor. If so, it failed for me.

“The Library had shown that human speech, with its linear meanings and weakly linked concepts, was simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds along the evolutionary path. So Messages could be more like experiences than signals.”


The worst was a section where Ruth is raped by one of the Minds. Communicating with the Minds involves full immersion in a pod so that they can be experienced. Verbal or written communication, apparently, is terribly inefficient and very backwards. The Mind initially floats the idea of having sex with her in return for some scientific information that will literally save Earth, which she quickly shuts down, but the next time they meet, it rapes her. Her bosses at the Library brush off it off, and the Mind itself gaslights her (“well, I wouldn’t have done it if part of you didn’t want it” basically). And that’s it. It happens, Ruth is obviously traumatized for a few pages, and then the story just moves on. And that’s not even going into the sexless Noughts, who prefer nonbinary pronouns and who Ruth and other characters repeatedly misgender as male.

“Immersed in a Message, do less. In gliding slowness you may glimpse the seeds of eternity.”


So what’s good about it? The whole structure of the library and its purpose – that some SETI messages are alien AIs, that humans can train themselves to communicate with them – was absolutely fascinating. There’s also some bits about wormholes and math concepts that seemed interesting but were, frankly, incomprehensible to me. There are occasional pops of humor (Ruth’s categorization of the various sorts of messages has stuck with me), though most of it fell flat.

Overall, unless all you’re looking for are some cool scifi concepts and don’t care about all that pesky characterization, I don’t recommend this book.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I loved the premise of this so much - a SETI library on the moon interpreting alien messages? It sounded so much like my jam. Unfortunately, I should have read some of the reviews before requesting because if I had, I would have given this a pass.

Let's start with the positives. As I said, I loved the premise! The whole concept was imaginative and I loved the science behind everything. The author clearly knows his stuff and you can tell because this reads as very much "hard" sci-fi. In this library, the librarians use pods to interface with whole AIs built from alien messages and I loved the look into how translating across species might work. I also appreciated the short chapters because it made the book fly by despite all the technical language.

On the other hand, aspects of the writing were really jarring to me. It probably took me 10% of the book to start to get a feel for the sentence structure and voice of the author and by then I had already cringed so many times at content in the book that I seriously considered DNFing it.

For example, early on Rachel is in a pod interfacing with an alien AI who wants to have sex with her and she says no because she doesn't want to and tells her supervisor who essentially orders her to do it anyway, eventually leading to rape that is just shrugged off. Additionally she is consistently assaulted by another woman in her "friend group" (although to be honest characters come and go so quickly with no explanation that I can't be sure) and just ignores it, only for it to be later revealed that <spoiler>the woman is altering Rachel's memory trying to get information about her work</spoiler> which comes out of nowhere and is never mentioned again. Rachel also thinks about her boobs and her period way more than any woman I've ever met, and something about her sexuality made me really uncomfortable. I'm all for sexual freedom, etc. but she was constantly on the lookout for a new hookup and it did not feel necessary.

Some other things that bothered me:
-The upper ranks of library workers are written to be sexless and genderless but they only use he/him pronouns?
-How is a Trainee Librarian qualified to do all of this top secret/world saving work?
-The overall plot felt really disjointed. What felt like the main plot (the Ythri) didn't show up until over a third of the way through the book and even then there was a series of little vignette adventures that didn't seem relevant. Even the end of <spoiler>learning the book has been Rachel writing her story as a book</spoiler> didn't make it make sense. In fact it was kind of a let down.

Overall I definitely think there is an audience for this book, but unfortunately it was not me.

I DNFed it at 15%.
I am not an evid Sci fi reader but I do enjoy it occasionally. This one was way above my level of comprehension.
The story takes place 200 years in the future. Our main character Rachel was accepted as a librarian on the moon, where there is a smirky alien AI that humans try to study. I could barely understand what was happening, and when the AI wanted to experience sex through Rachel I felt I had enough.
I don't know how appropriate were the LGBTQA+ representations, but I really disliked how the author represented Jewish people.
You can tell the author is a physicist, the science was very thoroughly descripted but the world building was lacking - I love Sci fi for the incredible atmosphere and just couldn't feel it here.
This book just isn't for me, next time I will do more research on the author and not just pick a book for it's pretty cover.

A great science fiction read based on real science. Benford continues to write realistic futuristic scenarios that are highly plausible. Hard science fiction fans will want to take a look at this book.

Giving this one a middle of the road rating since it definitely had its pros and cons.

Pro:
- The sci-fi aspect of this story, humans in space and contact with aliens, was all well done. This author is practiced within the genre so no real surprise there.

Con:
- The writing and characters in this just felt...a little forced I guess. For example, its really early on but there's a moment where our MC, Rachel, sees a once event and it reminds her of her period. Ummmm, what? I've been a chick for 31 years now and this has never once happened to me.
- Sexuality and sexism are also represented oddly in this one. I don't know that it's "toxic" or whatever, but it just felt odd.

Shadows of Eternity by Gregory Benford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interestingly enough, if I had read the post-script before the novel, I probably would have gotten into the tale a bit quicker.

Why?

Because it's an ongoing conversation with the writer Poul Anderson and his future history, concepts of future history, aliens, and where we might go as a species. And being a fan of Poul Anderson, I probably would have been much more enthusiastic. At least, I would have had a better idea where this might have gone.

As it is, this is not a short-term SF adventure featuring a simple librarian in space. Librarian for an alien archive, that is. What we actually get is snippets and adventures across decades and decades and then much further on down the line as humanity grows and learns and gets more involved in its own long-term survival.

But honestly? I didn't care so much for the MC. She was okay. The problems and the discoveries and the long-term SFnal ideas were much more interesting but that usually isn't entirely enough to hold a tale. Even if I wish it were so.

All told, I still found it enjoyable enough and don't regret it at all. Long-term adventure is pretty awesome, after all.

Gregory Benford has been writing science fiction forever. Well, at least for a very long time, anyway. His wikipedia bibliography shows that his first novel was published in 1970, and his first short story was published in 1966. His breakout novel, TIMESCAPE, was published in 1980 and won the Nebula, British SF, and Campbell Awards. Aside from TIMESCAPE, he may best be known for his Galactic Center Saga - one of my favorite series of all time. I have a certain fondness for FOUNDATION'S FEAR, his contribution as one of the Killer B's (Brin, Benford, and Bear) in the Second Foundation series. While I've read a smattering of his novels, I don't believe I've read any of his short fiction, although sitting on my to be read stack is "The Best of Gregory Benford", so I suspect that at some point I'll get around to reading his short fiction as well.

His latest novel, SHADOWS OF ETERNITY, is touted as a "return to the sweeping galactic science fiction that readers have been waiting for". That is the tag line that caught my attention and drew my interest enough to want to read the novel. While I don't think that "sweeping galactic science fiction" is an accurate description, it does take the reader to places that are certainly not of this planet.

The good news is that SETI has born fruit. We have received messages from aliens far beyond our solar system. Two centuries from now, there is a SETI library on the moon, where Librarians attempt to disect and understand messages from those alien civilizations, but the most interesting ones are from alien artificial intelligences. Ruth, the protagonist that we follow throughout the book, is a Librarian in training, and she starts with the most difficult of projects, one which no experienced Librarian has been able to crack. She thinks highly of herself, and while those thoughts appear to be warranted, they end up being a bit unbelievable at times.

It's difficult to describe the plot of the novel, as there are many different stories going on. They do occur in a serial fashion, and in general one does not seem to have anything to do with the next except the final story is set up by one of Ruth's successes early in the novel. The early events are not interesting in and of themselves, other than to set up Ruth's notoriety which leads to the final story that makes up a majority of the novel. The Ythri (an idea that originally came from Poul Anderson who is credited in the Afterword) are coming to our Solar System to talk to Ruth. They feel she has the key to help them find what they are looking for. The Ythri are secretive, of course, and don't really want to divulge the secret of their quest, although we find out early on in this story that they came via a wormhole and need to find the wormhole to be able to go home. Humanity has never found a wormhole, although the existence of them has always been postulated.

In the course of the story, Fraq, the leader of the Ythri, takes Ruth on a series of challenges, including free fall from space to the surface of the Earth, to going deep under the surface of Mars, to wrangling a wormhole near the corona of the sun. But what is it all for?

And that indeed is the question the reader is left with when reaching the completion of the novel. Yes, the novel has a lot of interesting ideas that Benford explores in great detail; it *is* a hard science fiction novel, after all. And ideas always form the basis of traditional core sf, which this is. However, the novel is disjointed. As I previously stated, there are multiple stories here. Characters are introduced early on and then left behind, either never to be mentioned again or brought up in an offhand way. And while each of the stories within the novel are interesting in and of themselves, other than the common point of having the SETI library involved, they are not interconnected at all. Indeed, the final sections of the novel state that Ruth is no longer with the SETI library, without much explanation of why the separation happened. In the end, it's not really clear what
story Benford was trying to tell.

I would be remiss if I didn't bring up what I believe to be something totally irrelevant to whatever story Benford is trying to tell, that of how sex is treated in the book, and in particular Ruth's sexual escapades. They really don't add anything to the novel at all, and at times are down right...icky. While I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, I still can't see the non-consensual sex with an AI episode as anything but off putting. It didn't add anything to the ongoing story, and it certainly didn't add anything to Ruth's character.

I really wanted to like this novel, and in fact there were portions that I found fascinating and interesting. But in the end, no number of interesting ideas - I really did like that sequence where the attempt was made to wrangle a wormhole excruciatingly close to the sun - were able to make this an inviting book. Benford is 80 now, and I hope that if he writes another novel that it will be better than this one. If he doesn't write another one, he's had a terrific career. Of that there is no doubt.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Saga Press for this ARC.

I’d never read anything by Benford before, so I didn’t know what to expect. Because of the length of the book, I had a look at spoilerish reviews about halfway through, and what reviewers said a lot was “hard sci-fi”, which this definitely was.

But, bewildering. Because there are 6 stories in here, and you get a sense of time passing without an actual idea of where you are in time at each point (except, somewhere in the almost unimaginable future).

Sexism:

Oh, a strong hint about that future is that male and female relationship roles are apparently reversed (this I imagine by trying to get into the author’s mind, not because I myself believe in roles), with the main protagonist — a woman — using men for sex (and, memorably, forgetting one lovely man’s name after a lengthy interaction), and men all needy and wanting commitment. (!)

Oh, but then there’s (also bewildering) a foray into this woman’s hormonal “stuff” — how she controls her period using medication, an episode of PMS, how she must think about when she wants kids but career first! and so on. (The F-F friendship that’s used as a frame for this is decidedly odd.) I found myself squinting and frowning a lot, trying to imagine what this author thinks women are like. But then, it’s sci-fi, right?

Her male partners are also so bafflingly one-dimensional (except for the one whose name she forgets).

So, sexism! A kind of clever reverse sexism, but sexism, nonetheless.

Characters:

And then, the characters! Incredibly unlikeable, most of them; and especially main one. The (spoiler) alien is at least interesting, and memorable — but, turns out, that one was inspired by Pohl, who created a whole world of them (Ythri), so, 😕

As mentioned above, the main protagonist’s POV is supposed to be a woman’s, but she feels badly characterised.

Concepts:

Very interesting concepts, if you can catch up. The author often introduces a new scene, concepts and characters with no background (spoiler, e.g. the Mat, which you have to pause your imagination for until you get an unclear description later in the chapter. But why Mat? Because it’s like a mat?).

Lots of catch-up in this book, and sometimes you never really do. I don’t mind hard sci-fi, which is usually necessarily high-concept, so this alone didn’t put me off; but it may others.

In summary:

I read most books to the end to try and get into what the author was trying to do. With this one, though, I tweeted about my bafflement because I really couldn’t get my head around most of it. In retrospect, it’s possible that the author tried to do too much in one book. Also came away thinking either the author doesn’t like people, and/or tried too hard to create a strong female protagonist by making her into a horrible man (🙃🥲)

It was interesting, though, for the concepts. For that reason:

Rated: 6/10, but unless you’re into hard SF, may not appeal.

Edit: I forgot to mention the treatment of non-gendered (?) people in this book, which is atrocious. (It??)