12/11/15
This book starts out a little slow. Some college kid gets woken up by his cell phone and keeps turning it off so he can get back to sleep. He knows he’s supposed to get up and go to classes, but after the night he had, no way. Still, his cell phone keeps ringing. He actually powers it completely down and the thing comes back on and is still yelling at him! By now, I would be really worried about whether I was still asleep or not. He finally answers his phone and then he’s off to rendezvous with something in the desert.
Turns out, his rendezvous was a serious necessity if he was to save all of humanity! Wow! That’s kind of an important meeting, don’t you think. Anyway, you start off with this kid living approximately around our time and then the next chapter has you flying through space as a Atlantic Union Marine. They’re combat dropping on to an asteroid that is supposed to be a mining operation. For some reason, the mining operation has not be answering radio calls so the Marines are going to find out why. From here on in the action is pretty fast and continuous. I just love this kind of science fiction story. There’s a lot of shooting and being shot, deranged robot mining machines and then alien droids coming from every where.
The whole premise of the story is that the kid, remember him, has been planning for the last 60 years to save humanity from an alien attack. At the time he had his meeting in the desert, Earth and all of humanity was just about as doomed as you can be. Yet, he had just wrote a scientific paper which alerted the envoy from deep space that there might be something worth saving in the Solar System. The only problem is that Earth has only 60 years to get ready.
Again, I really like the book because of all the fast action and it was a military science fiction book. What I found lacking was any in-depth background on the main characters. Even the kid, a.k.a., Marc Ibarra, wasn’t really covered in detail as to his background or anything. The same can be said for his Granddaughter, Stacy. How did she come to being and what apparently caused her to end up being the only Grandchild of Marc Ibarra. The story alludes to his Granddaughter as being very special but nothing happens that really shows her to be special, so far. Maybe that’s coming the in next books.
The nice thing about reading this book is that the next two books in the series are already published. “The Ruins of Anthalas” and “Blood of Heroes” are on Amazon and in my library. I have some more reading to do.