Review: Decent writing, hard to believe.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 4, 2012
The author's writing style is good but the "sci" behind the "fi" is limited.I'll save you some time and just say the rest of this review is based solely on the science, so if you are interested in actual plot points, this review won't be useful for you. I'll preface this review saying that this is a heavily character driven book, NOT a science driven book, so take the following observations with the appropriate weight. Also, I would classify this book as a romance novel, which is not my thing at all, and this definitely introduces an inherent bias in my reading and my review. If you are into romance novels as I am not, you'd probably really like this book. I chucked on a few stars because I realize that I'm really just not the intended reader.From here on out, there will be massive spoiler alerts. Some issues I had with the book:Detonating a nuclear bomb inside the Earth's core will likely not significantly heat it up. Assuming you can't drill to the center of the core, the bomb would be detonated at the inner core/outer core boundary. The outer core is liquid, so much of the energy would propagate as shockwaves through that. The rest of the heat (a significant portion still) would be transferred through the solid inner core, but I still don't think it would change the heat of the core a significant amount. Possibly it could mess with the dynamo, but to what extent I don't know - it's a very complex calculation.*****EDIT: I decided to do the calculation, which is a rough approximation assuming that the potential energy of the blast is entirely converted into heat and integrated over the volume of the outer core. I've calculated the change in temperature of the outer core, as well as the time required to dissipate the heat from the blast, for several different size nuclear blasts. Below are the results.1 Kiloton blastChange in Temp of outer core: 1.1 * 10^-20 CTime for heat dissipation: 4.1 * 10^-7 secondsHiroshima nuclear blast 16 Kiloton blastChange in Temp of outer core: 1.8 * 10^-19 CTime for heat dissipation: 6.5 * 10^-6 seconds50,000 Kiloton blast (largest nuclear bomb ever tested)Change in Temp of outer core: 5.6 * 10^-16 CTime for heat dissipation: 0.02 secondsBased on these results, I would conclude that a nuclear blast would not have much effect.I'd also point out that this would imply that humans have the ability to drill to the core -- good luck on that: Two options are either drilling a hole and sending the nuke down the hole (but once you expose the outer core (liquid) to the hole the pressure would send it shooting up to the surface, so you'd have molten iron/nickel to deal with at the surface - a whole different animal), or you could send the nuke down in a radiogenically heated capsule that would sink through the mantle due to the density differential...Which would take quite a while, methinks - more than likely outside the timescale of the book.Unfortunately, this proves to be the least worrisome of the scientific errs throughout the book. As this is a sci-fi, I can handle drilling to the core for now, and I'll humor the plot.So hypothetically a nuclear bomb detonates in the core...which causes accelerated global warming? It wasn't clear to me through reading (the science is pretty hazy) but I think the author intended one of two scenarios:1. The excess heat in the core from the blast would propagate through the Earth, causing warming.2. The excess heat in the core from the blast would interrupt the dynamo and change the Earth's magnetic field which in turn changes it's rotational axis, thus altering climate.Since I'm not sure which one the author intended, I'll address both.In scenario 1, the Earth's core quickly heating up will not "cause the Earth's oceans to swallow up the land". Solar insulation is the primary method for heating the Earth's surface. The heat within the Earth--radiated by the core and the radiogenic heating of certain isotopes within the Earth's mantle--releases its heat primarily through convection --plate tectonics!What this means for the story: A hotter core will cause more convection (more plate tectonics through an increased density contrast), and thus more conduction through the crust (the upper ~7-~100+ km of the Earth), but not enough to heat the Earth's atmosphere. I.E: touching the ground will not burn my hand if the temperature of the core increases a small amount. Not to mention that the increased heat from the core would take millions of years to propagate through the Earth's mantle (think dense rock flowing plastically over timescales of millions of years) and show any surface effects, leaving our heroine long gone.The takeaway message is that the Earth's core temperature is not responsible for the melting of the ice caps, so it's a reasonable assumption to make that even if the devious villain's plot worked, the sea levels would remain unchanged.In scenario 2, the heat from the core would interrupt the Earth's dynamo to some extent, and possibly change the magnetic field, but the Earth's angle of obliquity (rotational axis) is not controlled by it's magnetic field, but by the torque on the Earth by the sun due to the equatorial bulge of the Earth, so again, climate would not change, and sea level would remain constant.I'd also like to mention that I don't think a nuclear bomb could even be detonated that close to the core because of the pressure.All that being said, the bad guys are still trying to detonate a bomb in the core. I think the wisest course of action for our heroine would be to do nothing. We've already established that doing so will have no adverse effects on the Earth, and being 6371 km away from the surface, we can assume that the fall out won't reach us (lack of wind to move the fallout, as well as I can't think of a more effective radiation shield than 6371 km of dense rock). Not to mention, the science return from drilling to the core would be enormous, so I'd say let the bad guys make their mischief.Back on track: The massive earthquakes as a result of a hotter core is reasonable (if we swallow the hotter core thing to begin with, which I can't), except the earthquakes happen before any nuclear blast in the core occurs...So we're asked to believe that the alignment of the planets in the solar system causes increased plate tectonics, i.e. increased convection within the Earth's mantle? It's hard for me to buy that. Plate tectonics is primarily a gravity-driven process - the greater the density differential between the subducting slab and the crust and mantle, the more prevalent it is. If anything, aligning the planets would decrease plate tectonics because subduction trenches are geoid highs at relevant harmonics, and overall.Now, if the author were to say that the Earth has become tidally locked with the sun, (which in itself would be hard for me to believe because the timescales involved for the Earth's orbit to decay to a distance close enough to the Sun to generate tidal heating would again leave our heroine gone to the sands of time. Not to mention the Earth's surface would be hundreds+ of degrees, which would eliminate any story to begin with. Also, orbits tend to circularize over time, so how would the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit increase? If it did, we'd have bigger climate issues) then we can talk about a hotter core. (The tidal forces would cause some level of friction and increased temperature within the planet...). This all assumes that the angular momentum of the Earth would be conserved to allow for the "tidal lock" (increased eccentricity), so we would have to incur an astrophysical occurrence of enormous magnitude: I.E. an impact of a planetesimal, which would wipe out our heroine before the tidal forces would melt the mantle...Also, I'd briefly like to point out that detonation of electromagnetic bombs will not shift the Earth's axis. As I mentioned before, the Earth's rotational axis is a function of the equatorial bulge of the Earth attempting to align with the ecliptic plane of the sun.A main point in the plot is that the heroine acquires these new powers, but in no way do they affect the plot, except that the bad guys want to run some experiments on her when they find out (the bad guys finding out is unnecessary in the first place, because we've already established that the best course of action is inaction, so the heroine's husband need not jeopardize his wife's safety). The justification for her new powers is that the Earth will be swallowed in water, and thus it would be beneficial for her to be able to breathe and move rapidly underwater. It makes a bit of sense, but throughout the story the heroine only uses her powers recreationally - they do not affect the plot whatsoever. Additionally, the author makes her transformation out to be evolution and essentially says that evolution is organisms adapting to their environment, which is simply false. Evolution is the random mutation of organisms, followed by the survival/death of those organisms based on their ability to survive in their current environment. Evolution does not happen in one generation - organisms do not simply generate genes to be effective in the environment. To say that the heroine's contracting of a disease which gives her powers is evolution is entirely wrong.The ending was wrapped up too quickly. I felt that the plot took its time getting developed, but when the action started happening we are forced to swallow a lot information very quickly. I believe the author intended this to be a late-stage plot twist, but it all happened too fast to be effective -- adding characters at the very end (with 0 character development) and then telling us that they play large roles in the story (and the past hundreds of years) pulled me out of the story. In the author's defense, this is hinted at slightly earlier in the story but not really enough to generate the level of suspense required for me to want to continue reading.As a reader with a science background, it's pretty clear that the lack of viable science in this book was a source of distraction, and pulled me out of the story whenever mentioned (which honestly isn't that often). All that being said, the author's writing is great, and the lack of even remotely accurate science is fixable with a little creativity (which the author clearly has in abundance) and I would encourage the author to continue writing, because at the most fundamental level, her ideas are very cool and have the potential to make a great story.