The Collapsium

The Collapsium is a science fiction novel by the American writer Wil McCarthy, published in 2000. It takes place in the Queendom of Sol, a future in which two technologies have given human beings powers that earlier ages attributed to gods.

The first is wellstone, a programmable material that can take on the properties of almost any substance, natural, artificial or hypothetical. The second is collapsium, a crystal built out of miniature black holes, which allows information and matter, including people, to be moved across the solar system almost instantaneously. Bruno de Towaji invented it and now serves as royal consort, and he would rather be working on a device that could probe the farthest reaches of spacetime.

His rival, Marlon Sykes, is building a ring of collapsium around the sun as the first stage of a much larger communications project. When a saboteur damages the ring and sends it falling towards the sun, the two men have to set their quarrel aside, because the alternative is the destruction of the solar system and every living thing in it.