This book is by the creator of the Gabriel Knight games, of which I liked all three, and finished none :roll:. I didn’t bother reading the blurb bio before I bought the book though, and I didn’t recognize the name, so I just mention it as an aside for those of you who are familiar with the game series.
Dante’s Equations is a very ambitious book, which deals with fundamental physics, the kabbalah and the tree of life, and with the Problem of Pain among several interesting subjects. While it is quite interesting in many respects, sadly it falls far short in certain areas. Still, the book is a worthy effort; it may not be a glorious failure, but it is at least an interesting one.
Without spoiling the plot, the book revolves around a Polish physicist who apparently died at Auschwitz (or did he…) and his bizarre theories about the nature of good and evil as they relate to the fundamental wave equation. Various characters, including a University of Washington physicist and her grad student, an Israeli bible code researcher, a DoD agent, and a wealthy Fortean journalist get caught up in researching the physicist’s past and apparent death, and various fantastic plot complications ensue…
The book has several major foci, namely: modern physics and departmental competition; bible code research; kabbalah theory; holocaust history; espionage and governmental misdeeds of various kinds; and extrauniversal travel and adventure.
Of these areas, several are quite well done and are very interesting, including the stuff about the Kabbalah (which may seem to come out of left field for people who know nothing about it) and the challenging material on the holocaust and on the Problem of Pain. Other areas, however, are just not very well done.
Unfortunately Ms Jensen seems to have a very modest grasp of physics, mathematics, and the scientific character, if there can be said to be such a thing. Her exposition of the wave equation is fraught with errors, and the scientific procedures performed by her physicist are just insane and almost inconceivable even granting the character’s obsessive focus on academic success and self-sufficiency. For example: Jensen seems not to understand what a square wave (or indeed any kind of wave) is at all (although this is absolutely central to the plot), gets the history of atomic fission completely wrong, introduces several unnecessary anachronisms to the state of the art in the 1940s, and just generally fails to apply the logic of her physics concepts to her conceived “real world” in any sensible way. She would have done much better not to try to explain the weird effects in a scientific way than to explain them illogically and inconsistently.
For one perhaps-nitpicking and only slightly spoily example, a certain effect is said to increase the tendency of life to burgeon and multiply. This effect causes mice to be very healthy and even to procreate avidly and also causes virus cultures to multiply. Yet it also causes plucked ripe fruit to resist decay in the tradition of the pyramid scams of the 70s. But decay is of course caused by bacterial multiplication… This one small error can easily be ignored as a minor lapse, but such lapses occur so pervasively throughout all the science in the book that it becomes more than a minor annoyance; it is a major failure. There are many other more major lapses and gross errors which I omit to recount here since they would spoil the plot, but their presence is very unsatisfying indeed. Oh all right, I’ll mention another weird and illogical idea: why should evil as a physics concept (!!!) be associated with arctic climates and high gravity? This makes absolutely no sense at all and is just thrown in because the author apparently dislikes the cold and imagines that even natives would hate their lives under high gravity conditions…
In general, I would say a science fiction writer should avoid the impulse to explain fantastic but patently false pseudoscience. Just mention the general principle (space warps, negative energy, metatime dimensions, or what-have-you) and don’t try and explain science that doesn’t really exist. This advice is doubled and trebled when the writer has no scientific background and doesn’t really understand what he or she is talking about…
Anyway, moving on, the statistics of the bible code research (which is explained in considerable detail) are ludicrous. Any of the anomalous discoveries made by the rabbi-protagonist would be cause for front-page news throughout the world but are also patently absurd and impossible. Jensen doesn’t seem to understand computer methods well enough to know that the discoveries she describes in some detail would have already been obvious to bible-code fanatics. And anyway, the very idea that modern-day events would be clearly encoded in bible acrostics is so absurd as to almost derail the whole plot. Such a concept might barely be admissible in an occult horror novel where events don’t have to make sense, but it just doesn’t work in a book where everything is related to scientific concepts as well as religious ones.
The book is also seriously flawed in that most of the protagonists are deliberately quite unappealing. There is definitely a clear purpose to this characterization, but unfortunately for most of the book it is rather hard to root for them; in fact I think the most deliberately unappealing of all the characters (the DoD lieutenant*) was the only one I cared about at all.
I could go on for quite a while about various other serious literary problems in the book, but this note is long enough already.
On the plus side, which is hard to go into in detail without totally spoiling the plot, I should say that despite all the flaws, the book is still quite compelling, and if you can manage to slog through the pervasive errors and annoying characters there are some interesting and original ideas and worlds.
*Yeah right, like a lieutenant would have the responsibility he is given in this book. This guy would at a minimum be a major, and really might well be higher ranked. Jensen’s attribution of this guy’s life goal as being to beat out the captaincy held by his evil father is ridiculous, since pretty much any competent career officer can confidently expect to get to major or even lieutenant-colonel before competition for promotion really becomes an issue. And our boy may be a bit messed up, but he is certainly competent…