Quantum Space (Quantum #1), Douglas Phillips

Imagine and let your intellect… soar.

High above the windswept plains of Kazakhstan, three astronauts on board a Russian Soyuz capsule begin their reentry. A strange shimmer in the atmosphere, a blinding flash of light, and the capsule vanishes in a blink as though it never existed.

On the ground, evidence points to a catastrophic failure, but a communications facility halfway around the world picks up a transmission that could be one of the astronauts. Tragedy averted, or merely delayed? A classified government project on the cutting edge of particle physics holds the clues, and with lives on the line, there is little time to waste.

Daniel Rice is a government science investigator. Marie Kendrick is a NASA operations analyst. Together, they must track down the cause of the most bizarre event in the history of human spaceflight. They draw on scientific strengths as they plunge into the strange world of quantum physics, with impacts not only to the missing astronauts, but to the entire human race.

Review:

The story is set in present day and involves the developments of an experimental program called Diastasi being conducted at Fermi National Laboratory, or Fermilab, in the USA. The program revolves around the “theory” that the distance between two points within three-dimensional space can be compressed by the use of a beam of coherent neutrinos which convert a specific volume of three dimensional space to an equivalent volume of four dimensional space.

The pace of the story is well measured and the science behind the story made to be quite believable. This is due to the fact that most of the science contained within the story is factual, with the remainder being fictional. I was greatly appreciative of an afterword being provided, at the end of the novel, explaining, in considerable detail, where the factual finished and the fictional commenced.

The world building and character development are flawless with nothing feeling either out of place or incomplete.

Given all the above, why did I reduce the rating by half a star? Whilst all the science contained within the novel is very realistic, the politics of how things tend to work within the Washington DC Beltway, IMO, is not. It was with very good reason that people within positions of high political authority, like Eisenhower, feared the influence held by the US Industrial/Military Complex. The full political ramifications, both domestic and foreign, of the technology, IMO, have not been fully or realistically reported/explored within the novel. The person who was set up to take the fall would usually take the fall, and that’s where I’ll leave it so as not to ruin the story.

Quantum Space is something harder to find in the sci-fi genre now and I’ll be reading the next in the series.