Against Infinity

by Gregory Benford

Book Overview

On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man & a boy are on a hunt for the Aleph--an alien artifact that ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men's dreams & destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into an habitable planet. Now an ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, & a society seeks the power to rule the universe.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671459015
• ISBN13: 9780671459017
• Release Date: March 1984
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Tragedy on Ganymede

The book explores man's tendency to do evil, but also his ability to resist it while resigning himself to its permanence; in this way it reaches to the level of a great tragedy. But it's also science fiction, of course, and the book explores Ganymede, where settlers contend with various hardships and hunt overly populous animals genetically engineered and brought along to drink liquid ammonia on the moon, and where they must always try to avoid the constantly churning aleph, an age-old and impossible to describe device left by aliens to wander Ganymede forever. The reader finds himself contemplating the settlement of our solar system, the symbolism of the aleph (ruthless, brutal nature?), and the array of moral characters in the book."Against Infinity," indeed. The book shows what we are up against: infinite, brutal nature and permanent evil. In the book's central character, it shows a way to respond to these forces that is worth taking.

Coming of age story with sf elements.

I believed this was originally serialized in Aazing Sories magazine. Anyway the majestic otherwordly backdrop added something to this coming of age story. If you don't like science fiction you can just think of it as being like an Alaskan setting instead of a gas giant's moon. (In fact I almost thought it was Alaska except for the weird animals & mammoth alien machine.) Oh there's also bits about terraforming & advanced alien objects if you do like science fiction.