Genre: Hard Science Fiction
Description:
The book opens as the arkship Odyssey,
containing the last ten thousand humans from a ruined Earth, approaches her designated
new home, Proxima B, dubbed Persephone (for reasons which remained
opaque to this reader). Very soon it will be time to thaw the hibernating
passengers (‘popsicles’), transfer down to the planet and being settling in. It
has been a tough 50 year journey. Odyssey is blowing fuses all over. It becomes
a race against time to offload the popsicles before the starship disintegrates.
Persephone
is a hostile planet, with a beautiful geoglyph running across much of it. The
geoglyph looks a little like the Nasca lines on Earth. But nobody knows what it
is yet. It will be exciting to find out. So much awaits them!
An automated mission – Forerunner –
was sent ahead to Persephone to put a radiation shield grid in place and
set up habs for the colonists. This was successfully done, but now it is not
functioning. And without the radiation shield no human can survive down there.
The mission to fix the shield grid is where the story really starts.
Author:
Joint authorship, you will note. This is
particularly interesting as Kevin J Anderson is one of those authors whose work
you will definitely have read if you are remotely interested in SF in book, TV
or movie forms but have probably never heard of. Jeffrey Morris is variously a
writer, director and production designer mainly of hard SF films, graphic
novels and educational science curricula.
Appraisal:
There is an IMDb entry for this book, where
it is described as ‘the forthcoming deep-space adventure Persephone’ with
some luscious pre-production CGI ‘photographs’ of what’s supposedly coming.
There, Morris is listed as Director and Anderson as writer. This novel has been
‘inspired by‘ that screenplay. Readers of SF (self included) tend to do well
with (and, indeed, almost expect) a cinematic approach to this sort of fiction.
The novel is, of course, laid out as a movie, in scenes. The action is intercut
with flashbacks. Nothing unusual there, you will say – fiction is full of ‘em.
But the book’s Big Reveals tend to happen this way. I found it disconcerting at
times to have so much of the action happen offstage. And even then, from time
to time a significant info-dump was necessary.
The science is internally consistent and
plausible. Characters are well drawn. Human interactions are well thought
through. The authors are not afraid to make you care about a character and then
kill them off. The book is more vinegar than sugar for sure. But there is so
much going on that – like the colonists – the reader takes it on the chin and
moves on to the next problem which has to be solved, or else the last of
humanity is toast.
Quite a lot is made of the death of Earth,
how it became uninhabitable, how a point of no return was reached and this last
Hail Mary planned and executed, and how the death of Earth was absolutely down
to human beings. There is much in these fictional musings on Earth’s last days
which should give us all pause for thought.
And a great hook into a sequel closes the
novel.
If you like hard SF I recommend this to you.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words
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