The Eternity Artifact is L.E. Modesitt, Jr.‘s riff on an old science fiction chestnut, the lone artifact of a deceased alien society which causes a war among the various countries or factions or races or star nations, all of which want to plunder it for the secrets of its advanced technology. It’s reasonably entertaining, and Modesitt has added a few unique twists of his own. That said, I can’t really describe it as a success. One of the twists is a series of reflections on science, religion, and the epistemology of “true believers”, and his conclusions on the latter two grounds would strike anyone but a diehard philosophical materialist as absurd. I don’t know whether Modesitt is a materialist or not–it’s always dangerous to assume that the views of the characters of a book represent the views of the author. But the bad guys in the book belong to a group that appears to be patterned after the Mormon Church, which he’s picked on before. He’s a resident of Utah, according to the bio in the back of the book; maybe he’s a non-believer and living among Mormons grates on him, or perhaps he was raised Mormon and is writing about what he knows.

I can’t explain the circumstances which the religious folks in the book supposedly find intolerable without giving away too much of the plot, but really, it didn’t work. Not a bad read, though, if a bit silly.