a
novel ISBN 978-0930773-786 |
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a
novel ISBN 978-0930773-786 |
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Finalist in
Science Fiction of the Best Books 2006 Awards
usabooknews.com
"Best Books of '06," Kirkus
This first novel is the story of a disillusioned company of Army
engineers, languishing in the Pacific during the energy wars between the United
States on the one hand, and Japan and California on the other. They steal the
plans for an energy device that could end the wars and the world's slide into
environmental disaster, but use it to extort the price of their own freedom from
the world: the resurrection of an abandoned space colonization effort. They are
driven by Eduardo Torres, a seeming shell of a man wo destroys everything in his
way, and everyone who loves him, in his drive to escape his own past. With him
is the exotic and dangerous Tuyet Pham, a young woman who arrives from nowhere
but knows Torres better than he knows himself, and Sergeant Polaski, the
soulless warrior on whom the tormented Torres relies. Together they flee blindly
and with terrible losses, for the drones sent to scout the way have never
returned, and they can delay no longer.
What the Critics are Saying |
Kirkus Starred Review, September 2006:
"Uncompromising dramatization of the futility of
violence.
By 2017, a firestorm of wars over control of the Earth's dwindling energy
supplies engulfs most of the world. Platoon leader and former street orphan
Eduardo Torres receives orders to turn a Pacific island into an emergency
landing strip. The mission turns into a fiasco but
Torres encounters a strange old man whose powerful computer program holds the
design for a quantum energy battery. Torres consults his colleagues Sergeant
Polaski and MI (manufactured intelligence) expert Katherine Chan. In exchange
for the batteries, they demand a revival of the suspended space colonization
program. An already-completed hyperspace wormhole leads to star-system Holzstein,
which is known to have planets. Paranoid MI whiz Anne Miller constructs a fleet
of MI drones to explore Holzstein and another promising system beyond a second
wormhole, since, despite the batteries, Earth is dying. Once the colony fleet
passes through into Holzstein, some groups attempt to grab the habitable planets
Asile and Boar River, while another blockades the second wormhole after having
sent ships through to explore the Earth-like planet Serenitas. Torres and his
allies, seemingly unable to control the increasingly single-minded and ruthless
Polaski and forced to police the numerous conflicts, establish a military base
on a frigid, high-gravity planet and wait for the Serenitas drones to report
back. Years pass without result. Finally, Torres sneaks another probe through
the wormhole; it discovers that the original drones have been destroyed, along
with the ships that went through after them. Worse, the system contains an alien
fleet, which promptly follows them back to Holzsteinaliens powerful enough to
destroy everyone.
Inventive, disturbing, intriguingly populated and utterly fascinating: an
altogether remarkable debut."
Library Journal, October 15, 2006
"Day's debut novel paints a
grimly optimistic picture of the future while telling the personal stories of
his characters as they struggle to make their way in an uncertain world."
ew.com (Entertainment Weekly), November 2006, reviewed by Will Boisvert
"Day's epic paints an engrossing high-tech-decaying-into-low-tech future, with lots of Machiavellian intrigue and a fascinating struggle by humans to understand their machines. Grade: A"