Most of this mash-up of Timescape and A for Andromeda is a demonstration on how NOT to write hard SF. Cardboard characters, page-long info-dumps, and eventual decline into rants on how politicians don't understand science. For all the science lectures, and for a novel that involves both quantum phenomena and bubble universes, there's an astonishing lack of sense of scale.

Not recommended. ( )

Einstein’s Bridge is a hard SF novel of a type that could be described as old school, from the early days of Clarke, Asimov etc., and that’s its basic problem. It’s so focused on the Big Idea it’s plot is built around that it forgets that a few other things are required in a successful story these days – sympathetic and believable characters, for one.

The basic premise is fine – experimental high energy physics taking humanity to places where ‘Here Be Dragons’ – and there are some intriguing ideas in the supporting science. But there’s too much supporting science and too much exposition and info-dumping of it going on. And the characters had no real depth, no engagement to make you the reader care much for them.

The alternate history aspects of the story worked pretty well and seemed well thought out, but were hard work for a non-US reader such as this reviewer, even with the explanatory afterword sections. ( )

a very good read( when i finaly managed to get my sony tablet to work gonna buy a kindle next time ) well written and enjoyable with a lot of interesting ideas . well recommended and i will be sharing my copy with friends.

I received an ebook copy of this text free for an honest review from BookPressCafe, an author's cooperative that seems to allow authors to republish or republish their books, offsetting lower ebook prices with higher author percentages. "Einstein's Bridge" was originally published in 1997, and reprinted/republished as an ebook in 2013. These are my first thoughts on the text; I may add a more nuanced review later.

"Einstein's Bridge" is an intriguing work of near-future hard science fiction, starring physicists! The book, written in the early '90s, is set in 2004, 1987, and 1992, and chronicles the unexpected results of the Superconducting Super Collider (a project which, historically, was cancelled by Congress in the early 1990s). Part of its charm in 2013 is seeing 2004 described from the perspective of the early 1990s -- it's fun to see what he got right, what moved more slowly, and what moved more quickly than he predicted. It's also fun to ask yourself whether the technology his characters have in 2004 were actually around and simply not in common use. One of his main characters, for instance, uses a VR computer by way of cuffs and Magic Glasses that certainly mirrors current video game systems. But what was the actual state of this technology ten years ago?

I find myself a bit conflicted by this book. If you didn't want a certain degree of scientific and historical accuracy and detail, you wouldn't be reading this novel. At the same time, the way the information gets to the reader sometimes seems really contrived. Some of our characters meet in Cern, so we learn about the European supercollider experiments. GREAT! But then, the characters end up in a conversation about the SSC (one of the characters is moving to the US) that really only exists so the author can go on and on in a three-page "Well, let me tell you about Waxahachie . . ." sideline. And later, we get a similar thing with the magic glasses -- when George takes them off on the plane, the woman in the next seat asks him about them, and we get his three-page explanation of them. The information is nice; the set-up feels like a set-up.

Cramer makes an effort in this book to set each alien race apart, to explain their different developments and intelligences. We see important distinctions between The Hive and The Makers, and we understand a bit about why each is as it is. I like this. Sometimes, though, his efforts become clunky. The Makers, for instance, think in terms of large numbers. In particular, their unit of measure seems to be the gross (144), or perhaps the gross of orbits. Because the word is only used in this way from the perspective of Tunnel Maker, it clearly tells us something about him and his civilization. At the same time, it's an uncommon enough word that it's disruptive in the text, especially where it appears three times in a few paragraphs in chapter 1.7. The vocabulary disrupts the reading experience. This is, of course, a danger in a book striving for accuracy. One of the more interesting things about his aliens is that they all seem, at some point, to have begun a program of directed evolution to develop their scientific skills. There's a lot of political and theological baggage waiting to jump out here.

I think the last thing I want to point out is that because the book is about recent history/near future, and because it's hard science fiction, the last 10 percent of my edition is taken up with textual apparatus explaining the history, the politics, and the acronyms related to the book. It's interesting, and quite possibly worth a read by itself, just as a primer on the topic at hand. ( )

I enjoyed this book a lot. I liked the alternate reality that morphs into the actual reality but the ending was way too quick and disappointing. The section at the end comparing the book with the facts was interesting. It's sad that the US dropped the ball in this field but I suspect it's symptomatic of the marginalising of science that's occurring there.