"Phoenix" by S. F. Said

[Unmarked spoilers in the body of this post.] 

This is a book about a boy who has the power to violently explode. He is also racist toward aliens (though he does grow out of it) and apparently destined to save the galaxy from something called "the Wolf that Eats the Stars". It could have been good science fiction.

Unfortunately, whenever the author touched science, he got it wrong.

He doesn't seem to care that the signs of the zodiac do not correspond to individual stars. I can excuse his screwing around with what dark matter does because we don't know what it actually does (if it even exists), but I can't excuse his screwing around with what demons are like, even if none actually show up in-story. (Lucifer did not, in fact, bring free will. What Lucifer brought was slavery to sin, and you should never name a good guy after him, much less insinuate even remotely that he was any semblance of a good guy.)

(I have more to say about the whole "Lucifer gave humans free will" thing, which basically boils down to "NO HE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT." If Adam and Eve hadn't had free will, he wouldn't have been able to tempt them away from God at all, even for a bit. But he did tempt them, so they must have already had free will, so he didn't give it to them. [And really, what would be the point of God telling those two "don't eat from this tree" if they weren't able to do it anyway?]. All Lucifer brought humanity was sin, which is a manifestly terrible gift. And in order to fall away, he himself had to have free will in the first place, so it's not like he created it contrary to God's plan either. QED-ish; I can put all that into formal syllogisms if you want.)

Even if it were possible to make a device that collapsed stars into black holes, that wouldn't make a black hole big enough to eat the rest of the galaxy. When the device is used, the resultant black hole would have the exact same mass as the original star (conservation of mass strikes again), and thus its gravitational attraction on everything around it would be the same. Sure, that star's planets would have a bad time with their lack of sunlight, but they won't be inexorably dragged into the new black hole.

Also, throwing energy into a black hole is the second least helpful thing you could do to try to get rid of it (second only to throwing matter into the black hole). All you'll be doing is making the problem worse.

Still on the subject of the black-hole-making-device, I find it hard to believe that turning stars into black holes is a very efficient way of generating the energy necessary to power your giant energy barrier. Dyson spheres come to mind. Matter-antimatter reactors. Normal nuclear reactors. Harnessing the tremendous energy of the vacuum, if you want to get really crazy. Some sort of made-up energy-dense alien material you have to mine. But nooooooooo, we have to be all "humans are killing the stars aaaaaa."

(On that note, could we please have a war-with-aliens story where the humans are in the right in their anti-alien war? Like The War of the Worlds, but more modern. It's the same problem as dragons [elaborated a bit more here]; "fight the thing" makes a perfectly good story, and yet authors persist in talking to the thing or feeling bad about killing the thing or discovering we're actually the bad guys for attacking the thing. Yeesh.)

Oh, and convection! All the heat and energy thrown out by the main character violently exploding has to go somewhere, especially when he's unleashing his full power right next to all his friends. I find it difficult to believe they actually survive the climax of the book.

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. It would have worked better as space fantasy, like D&D's Spelljammer setting, where you are fully justified in just making stuff up to fit your concepts (proper science fiction should at least pay a bit more than lip service to actual science, which this doesn't.)

The prose here is interspersed with surreal, fractal-y white-on-black lineart and equally surreal depictions of ancient godlike beings. The fractal-y lineart is sort of cool; the beings, not so much.

The book's message--it essentially boils down to "interpersonal connections are what make people matter"--is also somewhat dodgy theologically, but I don't have the energy and experience to do a real analysis of that.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for swearing and nudity (the main character's power to violently explode does not spare his clothes, and |a mostly offscreen strip search also happens|.) And also the above-mentioned Lucifer thing.

1 star. Would have gotten 3, but, again, the Lucifer thing.

(Endnote: The Dark Matter Bombs from this have an effect that sounds suspiciously similar to that of the M.D. Device / Little Doctor from the Ender's Game books.)