An intriguing story of what could be humanity's future, both on Earth and across the reaches of space.
Lucas awakens on Earth thousands of years after the fall of humanity. His memories are incomplete and he is haunted by dreams of a woman. He familiarizes himself with advanced technology while he searches for a way to make contact with any humans still alive on far-flung colony worlds. It sounds simple, but it is not.
The science fiction elements of this book solidly establish the futuristic setting. Constructs, a race of sentient artificial intelligence, have revived Lucas from his damaged cryostasis chamber and are teaching him how to work with their technology. Lucas uses programmable matter to create tools and traverses great distances with “fold travel.” The determination to remember the woman and other lost parts of his past, as well as the search for ways to find other survivors, give the story human warmth to balance the technical aspects.
The desire for human connection is a driving force and so is the search for explanations about the past. Lucas is able to access the historical archive of the Constructs, but he still travels across the Earth looking for answers. His exploration of ancient ruins and encounters with wildlife that has evolved over the centuries reinforce the distance between his original lifetime and the time period he currently inhabits. At one point he shouts, “I should be dead and buried, but I’m not. Instead, I am like a wandering ghost that haunts this world!”
To capture the story in a visual sense - imagine a race like the Mecha who reactivate the android David in the movie “AI,” add in the missing memories and haunted dreams of Tom Cruise’s character in “Oblivion,” and along with the ruins of Earth’s past from that movie mix in the frightening creatures of Will Smith’s “After Earth.” Once the story moves out from Earth in the search Lucas makes for humanity among the stars, it begins to take on the feel of The Expanse novels by James S. A. Corey. The presence of the Constructs also gives the book a similarity to We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy sci-fi books such as those, as well as those that include descriptions of the technical aspects involved in how the technology within the story works.
I received a free ARC from Reedsy Discovery for review purposes and my review was originally published on their website.
No comments:
Post a Comment