This was an entertaining courtroom drama that happened to geek out all over the place with a coherent explanation of quantum mechanics AND a relevant hard SF extrapolation of the theories.

What is that in laymen terms?

Murder mystery meets many-worlds.

I'm sure those people who geek out over courtroom dramas will get a lot more out of this novel than me. I would have been perfectly peachy with an action-science thriller, and I'll be frank, this novel would have met a five star for me if it had been. It was polished enough in plot to stand with its head held high without diving into anything else, but I'll give it props for being very decent in both hard SF and legal mystery stuff.

My personal wishes have nothing to do with whether this book was excellent. And it was excellent.

The science was particularly well-done and engaging and it was also so damn relevant to the plot that I couldn't help but squee with delight at the explored and exploited plot-lines.

It wasn't set very far in the future, but the opened horizons made me feel that ever-so-desired sense of wonder I always pray for in a science-fiction novel.

There wasn't any worldbuilding here. It was just a widening of our myriad possibilities. If only we could have stayed on that side of the novel. *sigh*

Please don't get me wrong. I live for novels that genre-bend. It allows us readers to swim in oceans of new possibilities. I just don't like it when a mix feels like a noose to reel-in characters, even if it provided very decent and ongoing conflict.

I'm afraid I'm prejudiced a bit against mysteries. It doesn't matter how many I've read. They have a place in my heart, but they'll never quite open up my head. Otherwise, I loved all the ideas, no matter if a lot of them have been done before.

The novel has a modern sensibility and a very clear style. I'm sure most people would get through the novel quite easily.

It's the ideas within that will stay with me.
You ought to know what I mean, though. It's all about quantum alien intelligences, bridging the Holtzman gap between the subatomic and macro, manipulating probability wave collapses, the mirror-image duplication of characters, and even e-paper computers that remotely tap into supercolliders.


It's the little classic stuff of SF. In a murder mystery/courtroom drama.

I'm pretty sure most other readers, whether they like mystery or SF, will get a great deal of satisfaction out of the novel. I wish you well with it!
( )

The author appears to have been inspired by Schrödinger's thought experiment in which "a hypothetical cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur."(Source: Wikipedia.)

Jacob Kelley, college professor and former physicist, for the New Jersey Super-Collider receives a visit at his home from a former colleague, currently employed by the same super-collider, the arrogant Brian Vanderhall, who claims to have made a significant breakthrough in quantum mechanics. While discussing his research with Jacob and his wife, Brian pulls out a gun and shoots Jacob's wife at point blank, but the bullet passes harmlessly through her. Enraged, Jacob slugs Brian who flees Jacob's home.

The novel's chapters divide into two different scenarios for Jacob, alternating chapters entitled with either "up-spin" or "down-spin." One involved a Jacob who is currently in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Brian while the other one drives to the super-collider only to find a murdered Brian. While the free Jacob is deep within the collider, he is attacked by a faceless, odd amalgramation of a human being who appears to be able to bend space and time. Escaping to the surface, he jumps into a beckoning vehicle only to discover a very much alive Brian. (Are you confused yet?)

As the novel's plot unfolds and the free Jacob tries to prove the jailed Jacob is not guilty of the murder, the reader discovers what created double protagonists and antagonists and the humanoid creature. Although the speculative fiction was an entertaining romp through the subatomic world, it did have me repetitively researching a dummies guide to quantum mechanics. ( )

2.5 stars, barely, rounded down to two.

The quantum physics part of the story was very interesting, but the characters were very flat to me, very two-dimensional, almost like they were thrown in to show specific characteristics about the main character. For example, the wife and family seemed to be there only the show how good a husband/father he is. The (dumb) buddy is there to show how smart he is.

Aside from the mind-bending theoretical physics, this was all very pedestrian, and very disappointing. ( )

Told in alternating chapters headed Up-Spin and Down-Spin - until the text’s narration merges in Chapter 40 - Superposition is an exploration of quantum theory and how it might manifest in the macroscopic world if its effects were to apply there. At the same time it is a crime story with a murder at its heart. The victim, Brian Vanderhall, was a physicist who has managed to find a way to interact with creatures from the quantum world, using their knowledge to build a Higgs projector, which can locally alter the Higgs field, thus allowing bullets, for example, to be fired at an object and pass around it, plus various other might-as-well-be-magic occurrences.

The Up-Spin chapters see Jacob Kelley relating the events surrounding the crime and its aftermath, the Down-Spin ones depict Kelley’s trial for the murder. At first the chapters are set at different times but they eventually become contemporaneous. Irruptions from the quantum world have meant that two sets of Kelley - and some other characters - can exist at one time, their probability functions supposedly spread out (superposed) in the manner of sub-atomic particles. Quite how this squares with there only being two - or at most three - versions of each is left unexplained, or, more charitably, a form of artistic licence.

As might be imagined there is a plethora of information dumping and explanation. For this, handy non-Physics-knowledgeable characters provide useful sounding boards. While necessary, these explanations do tend to the obtrusive and there are occasional other narrative infelicities.

The back-cover blurb from William Hertling, “Walton’s captivating writing will draw you in, the murder mystery will keep you reading and you’ll finish with a better understanding of quantum physics,” is wrong on all three counts. Walton’s writing is up to the task but rarely more than workmanlike, the murder mystery is the least of the attractions and the last will only apply if you didn’t know anything about it already. (Arguably even if you do. As Niels Bohr said, anyone who isn’t profoundly shocked by quantum physics hasn’t understood it.) The text also betrays some unreconstructed ideas about both the triggering of female sexual arousal and maternal instinct. The plot depends for its continuation on the lack of collapse of the probability functions of both Kelley and his daughter Alex/Alessandra yet other characters not so necessary to it revert to the one form relatively quickly.

In addition Walton represents the “split” characters as mirror images of each other. Down-Spin Kelley – and one version of daughter Alex - have been active throughout. They will require to have eaten during this time. Like most other biological molecules carbohydrates, fats and proteins are compounds which are chiral (ie exhibit handedness – all in the same sense.) A mirror image body would not be able to metabolise food molecules inverse to it (the only ones available) since its relevant processing enzymes work only with the correct handedness, and hence it would starve. This is not a problem Roger Zelazny avoided in his novel Doorways in the Sand: he addressed it straight on. Walton doesn’t even seem to be aware of it.

Superposition is an entertaining enough tale – the courtroom scenes are well realised, if familiar from countless screen dramas. And it does fulfil the function of the detective novel. If you want a primer on quantum Physics dressed up as crime fiction this is the book for you. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The older and more experienced I get as a professional book reviewer, the more I'm realizing that there are in fact two radically different types of science-fiction novel out there, a genre which I've been faithfully (if not indiscriminately) reading since I was a kid; there are the science-fiction novels that work just as great general novels as well, full of complex characters and a strong style and a plot that is airtight relative to its own internal universe; and there are the science-fiction novels that can only be loved by hardcore fans of science-fiction (say for example the ones who attend a large amount of SF conventions every year, which is why such novels tend to do well at convention-based awards programs like the Hugos), the kind that would otherwise be considered mediocre at best by a fan of general fiction but that fetishistically deliver on the exact kinds of genre details that those genre fans are salivating over. And in fact this is where we get the entire concept of "genre novel" to begin with, I've also come to realize; when someone calls a book one, they're not necessarily implying simply that it's a book written in that genre, but instead that it's an otherwise so-so book that is loved by its fans solely and exclusively for delivering the kinds of easy details that those genre fans are looking for in the first place (whether that's disturbingly intelligent serial killers in crime novels, haughty elves in fantasy novels, half-naked pirates in romance novels, dysfunctional families in hipster-lit novels, etc).

And while I'm a huge fan of SF publisher Pyr for all the legitimately fantastic novels they put out every year, I must also admit that they put out an even bigger number each year of these so-so con favorites, because this is the bread and butter of any genre publisher and, hey, even Pyr's gotta pay for baby's new shoes, right? Take for example the recent one-two series Superposition and Supersymmetry by defense-industry engineer David Walton, whose Goodreads pages to be fair are littered with mostly 4- and 5-star reviews, but that personally made me almost cause permanent damage to my skull from all the eye-rolling I did while making my way through them. Essentially crime novels set among the employees of a fictional atom smashing facility in New Jersey, the premise is that one of these employees has finally caused a successful Quantum Something Or Other (ah, the Quantum Something Or Other -- where would lazy 21st-century science-fiction be without it?), causing a Quantum hole in the universe where Quantum creatures have Quantum gotten in and are Quantum causing a bunch of Quantum damage to our own universe.

Filled with the kinds of half-baked two-dimensional characters you would expect from a mediocre genre novel (wives who exist for no other reason than to show you that the main character is a good husband, the random blue-collar friend who exists for no other reason so that the main character can present a dumbed-down expository explanation of what's going on), and told through courtroom scenes that sound like a sub-par version of a Law & Order episode (which is saying a lot), Walton tries to have it both ways here, with characters that sometimes react to all the magical nonsense without blinking an eye, but then sometimes spend entire chapters saying "What's going on? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!!!" when it's convenient for the plot that they do so. A mess of a series that is nonetheless loved by many, these are the kinds of novels that can only be tolerated by the kinds of genre fans who tear through a book like this every single day, and who don't really care whether it's well-done as a piece of literature as long as the word 'quantum' appears a thousand times in 300 pages. It should all be kept in mind before picking up a copy yourself.

Out of 10: 6.9 ( )