Entropy, by Gerald Kilby
This is the second book in The Belt series, preceded by Entanglement.
This book picks up a couple of years after Entanglement ends, but with the same major characters aboard the same spaceship. One of the "characters" is the ship's "Quantum Intelligence", named Aria, who has on several occasions declared that its primary duty is to protect the safety and well-being of the ship's crew.
There's been no direct mention of how long Aria has been in existence - another QI ("the most knowledgeable and wisest of all the minds that existed in the system") has been around for 50 years, and it seems that Aria is not that far behind. The spaceship which Aria is installed in is 90 years old. It seems very strange, therefore, that in all the time Aria has been dealing with people, and especially being installed in a spaceship with the primary duty of protecting the crew, that Aria has "little understanding of the human mind", as stated in chapter 5.
This book also repeats from the previous one (and several times) the bizarre concept of the crew making their way "down" from a 1-g to a zero-g environment.
From chapter 5 to 7 the commander of the ship is implausibly irresponsible, and the chief engineer fails to just get on with what needs doing in the commander's absence (which happens to be engineering work). These are not believable senior spacecraft crew.
In chapter 8, someone (in a spacesuit, because there is no atmosphere) arrives at the outside of an airlock to a research station, opens it, goes inside the airlock, and closes the door, then starts to pressurise the airlock. "The outer door swung open without warning" and the person who entered sees two people (who quickly turn out not to have spacesuits on), and all three then go "through a short corridor and into a brightly lit space".
So, it's obviously the inner door which the two people appeared at. Gerald should also know by now (from all his copious reading of Asimov, Clarke and Herbert, if nothing else) that once an airlock is mid-cycle either pressurising or de-pressurising, you cannot open either the inside or the outside door.
I'm starting to wonder whether I read Colony Mars in something of a daze, and maybe that story is just as full of holes as this later book is.
Chapter 12 contains the splendid start to a sentence "By the seventh the day out from Europa…", once again illustrating how much I hope this book really didn't even have an editor or proofreader. If it did, they're not worthy of the job title.
In chapter 14, someone "rushed over and wrapped his arms around her, follow by an equally enthusiastic…". Oh dear.
By the time we get to chapter 20, one of the characters is in a space station, of the by-now-typical toroidal construction, to create artificial gravity on the inner surface of the torus. Three decks are described; an outer one for "day-to-day operations", an inner one for accommodation, and an even-further-inner one for services. The gravity on the accommodation deck is described as "varying in intensity between your feet and your head", causing mild dizziness in some people, resulting in them "preferring to migrate to the operations deck as soon as they wake up".
This rather begs the question of how big the space station is, and more importantly, how much separation there is between the operations deck and the accommodation deck.
If we assume that someone needs to experience at least a 10% difference in gravity between their head and their feet before it causes dizziness, and that a maximum 5% difference is imperceptible (and also that the distance between their feet and their head is approximately 2 metres), this means that the accommodation deck must have a maximum radius of 20 metres, whereas the operations deck has a minimum radius of 40 metres. That's an awful lot of space between the two decks (and they're not described as being separate toroids on a common axis).
If, on the other hand, we start with an operations deck 40 metres in radius, and a ceiling 3 metres above the floor, with a further gap of 2 metres between the ceiling and the floor of the accommodation deck above, it means that people are perfectly comfortable experiencing a 5% difference in gravity between their head and the feet, whereas a 5.7% difference on the deck above makes some of them dizzy…
Finally, if we assume there needs to be at least a 10% difference in the gravity differential between your head and your feet on the two different floors to make a useful difference, and we allow 3 metres between the floors of successive levels, the innermost core has to be at most 2.53 metres in diameter (making the accommodation level 7.265 metres in radius, and the operations level 10.265 metres in radius). Anything bigger than that, and there's less than 10% difference in the feeling you get on the accommodation level from the operations level.
Oh well, never mind - in the very next paragraph, this character finds a stairway "leading down to the outer deck". So, "down" is finally acknowledged as the direction towards the outside of the torus - that's good progress :)
In chapter 21, a character who up until now has been known as Regina Goodchild is unfortunately mis-spelled as Godchild. Has anyone seen a proofreader around here?
High praise for chapter 23 - it contains the word "plinth".
The very last paragraph of the entire book cries out for the proofreader to wake up again: "I hope you are enjoying the story so far. If s, then please leave a review. Just a simple 'liked it' would be great, it helps a lot."
Entropy is followed by Evolution.
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