Glorious

Name: Glorious
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Gregory Benford
ISBN: 9798855518368

Author: Gregory Benford, Larry Niven

Series: Bowl of Heaven

Narrator: James R. Cheatham

Unabridged: 15 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/30/2025

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction

Synopsis

Glorious continues the hard science fiction Bowl of Heaven series from multi-award-winning authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven.

Audacious astronauts encounter bizarre, sometimes deadly life forms, and strange, exotic, cosmic phenomena, including miniature black holes, dense fields of interstellar plasma, powerful gravity-emitters, and spectacularly massive space-based, alien-built labyrinths.

Tasked with exploring this brave, new, highly dangerous world, they must also deal with their own personal triumphs and conflicts.

About Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford is a physicist, educator, and author. He received a BS from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. He is the author of over twenty novels, including In the Ocean of the Night, The Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), Foundation’s Fear, Bowl of Heaven (with Larry Niven), Timescape, and The Berlin Project. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award (BSFA), the Australian Ditmar Award, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bradley on March 12, 2020

Remember reading adventures where a full team goes in to explore a strange new world and only a handful come out alive? Where very strange creatures with even stranger motives tease and tempt you into situations you know you shouldn't be in, but you're just TOO CURIOUS to resist? Yeah, I love those a......more

Goodreads review by Gerhard on May 30, 2020

In their Afterword Benford and Niven refer, rather tongue-in-cheek, to a centuries-long dialogue that began with Dante’s Divine Comedy, continued with Stapledon’s Star Maker, and has since been refined by the likes of Niven’s own Ringworld and Shaw’s Orbitsville. This dialogue is the “calculated limi......more

Goodreads review by Traveling on June 23, 2020

Glorious is the third and final book in the Bowl of Heaven series by authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. This story picks up with the crew of the SunSeeker headed to Glory with the Bowl of Heaven trailing behind. The draw of this book is that the reader finally gets to see Beth, Cliff, Redwing,......more

Goodreads review by Michael on July 27, 2020

A very frustrating book, as the third book of a trilogy. The characters have changed, and are all now basically cardboard assholes, humans who think the universe owes them something, because they flew across it. Much less of it than we were told in the first 2 novels. And they weren't very complete......more

Goodreads review by Tim on February 16, 2023

Better than I thought it would be but ... I welcome one last shot from two authors who have done great work. I was glad to see that the ramblings of the first two books actually were headed somewhere. And I accept that the idea of the books was to explore some Big Smart Object ideas and some ways th......more