- Cawdron, Peter.
Anomaly.
Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4657-7394-4.
-
One otherwise perfectly normal day, a sphere of space 130 metres in
diameter outside the headquarters of the United Nations in New York
including a slab of pavement and a corner of the General Assembly
building becomes detached from Earth's local reference
frame and begins to rotate, maintaining a fixed orientation with
respect to the distant stars, returning to its original orientation
once per sidereal day. Observers watch in awe as the massive slab of
pavement, severed corner of the U.N. building, and even flagpoles
and flags which happened to fall within the sphere defy gravity and
common sense, turning on end, passing overhead, and then coming back
to their original orientation every day.
Through a strange set of coincidences, schoolteacher David Teller,
who first realised and blurted out on live television that the
anomaly wasn't moving as it appeared to Earth dwellers, but rather
was stationary with respect to the stars, and third-string TV news
reporter Cathy Jones find themselves the public face of the scientific
investigation of the anomaly, conducted by NASA under the direction
of the imposing James Mason, “Director of National Security”.
An off-the-cuff experiment shows that the anomaly has its own local
gravitational field pointing in the original direction, down toward the
slab, and that no barrier separates the inside and outside of the
anomaly. Teller does the acrobatics to climb onto the slab, using a
helium balloon to detect the up direction as he enters into the
anomaly, and observers outside see him standing, perfectly at ease, at
a crazy angle to their own sense of vertical. Sparked by a sudden
brainstorm, Teller does a simple experiment to test whether the anomaly
might be an alien probe attempting to make contact, and the results
set off a sequence of events which, although implausible at times, never
cease to be entertaining and raise the question of whether if we encountered
technologies millions or billions of years more advanced than our own,
we would even distinguish them from natural phenomena (and, conversely,
whether some of the conundrums scientists puzzle over today might be
evidence of such technologies—“dark energy”, anyone?).
The prospect of first contact sets off a firestorm: bureaucratic
turf battles, media struggling for access,
religious leaders trying to put their own spin on what it means,
nations seeking to avoid being cut out of a potential bounty of
knowledge from contact by the U.S., upon whose territory the
anomaly happened to appear. These forces converge toward a conclusion
which will have you saying every few pages, “I didn't see
that coming”, and one of the most unlikely military
confrontations in all of the literature of science fiction and thrillers.
As explained in the after-word, the author is trying to do something
special in this story, which I shall not reveal here to avoid spoiling
your figuring it out for yourself and making your own decision as to
how well he succeeded.
At just 50,000 words, this is a short novel, but it tells its story
well. At this writing, the Kindle edition sells for just US$0.99 (no
print edition is available), so it's a bargain notwithstanding its
brevity.
December 2011 