Blasphemy by Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston and co-author Lincoln Child write the Agent Pendergast thrillers I love so much.  Both authors are bestsellers individually, and I was curious to read this book by Douglas Preston

Preston has a unique sense of what is timely.   The book introduces us to a supercomputer named Isabella buried deep in the Navajo Indian Reservation, which was designed to create a big bang.  As I was reading this story I thought that the science in it was pure fiction.  After I finished the story, I saw on the news that an organization called CERN had created a Large Hadron Collider to “smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other to recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang.”  I may never have paid attention to this news item if I hadn’t read the book.

The book also features some of the controversy surrounding man’s ability to create a big bang.  The group “The Lifeboat Foundation,” considers CERN’s collider a risk to humanity.   The big bang theory contradicts some religions, and therein lies one of the major struggles in the book, and we begin to see very early in the novel that these contradictions are going to converge. 

Science, religion, greed, moral decay, and God are just a few of the topics for discussion for book club.  This is a thriller, so some people might not like this book, but it does bring up a lot of interesting topics.

Rating: 6.5