Greg Benford's 'Eater' Eater, Gregory Benford'simpressive new cosmological thriller. Gregory Benford's Eater is a book fans of his Nebula Award winning 1980 novel Timescape or his 1997 Cosm will find easy to enjoy. As the book opens, Benjamin and Channing Knowlton, a husband and wife team of radio astronomers at the High Energy Astrophysics Center in Hawaii, discover an anomalous source of gamma radiation in deep space. At first they assume it is a gamma ray burster, a highly energetic extragalactic phenomenon formed by the collision of a black hole with a large mass of conventional matter.
Man is a small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
They soon discover, however, that not only is the mystery object within the Milky Way, it is decelerating through the Kuiper Belt on a course that will bring it into the solar system. And it's intelligent. Its power awesome, its motives questionable, Eater begins transmitting its demands to humanity shortly after it gouges a huge scoop out of Jupiter. As the object heads for Earth, a desperate scramble to comprehend and possibly confront it commences. The urgency is compounded by the fact that Channing is in the final stages of an advanced cancer and hasn't much time to live.