(Jan.) FYI: Benford, who, like Alicia Butterworth, teaches physics at the University of California at Irvine, is a recipient of the United Nations Medal in Literature. It provides a sterling launch for Avon's new SF and fantasy imprint, EOS. This may be the most enthralling science-fictional portrayal of how actual science is done since Benford's own Nebula Award-winning 1980 novel, Timescape. They're complex human beings, each with a full array of strengths and weaknesses, each fighting for time to do good work despite the demands of students, university administrators and friends. Expanded from his 1990 novella, 'Beyond the Fall of Night,' this dense, lively, far-future SF novel from. His highly believable characters have little in common with the unrealistic scientists of so much SF. Warner Aspect, 23.95 (338pp) ISBN 978-9-0. Benford (Sailing Bright Eternity) is himself a physicist of some repute, and his novel depicts cutting-edge science the way it's actually done in the cluttered, fund-starved laboratories of a modern university. There, she and her team of physicists and grad students must simultaneously study the marvel-which turns out to be a space-time wormhole-and fend off Brookhaven's attempts to shut down the project, a variety of religious crazies, environmental know-nothings and, eventually, the federal government. Not knowing what it is but realizing that it's something new to physics, Butterworth violates her agreement with Brookhaven by taking the ball to her own university for examination. After an explosion occurs, Butterworth finds a mysterious, chrome-colored ball floating in the wreckage. Things quickly go wrong with the experiment, however. Alicia Butterworth, a talented young black scientist, is elated to be able to try out her experiment in nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
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