I hate to state that this is a very short book. It’s almost a short-story, but I won’t go that far. The story-line is pretty simple especially when you already know what’s going to happen by the title of the book. Still, the author doesn’t make it sound as devastating as it probably would be. He limits his story to just a few people and they only have very limited experiences of failing gravity until the very last part of the book.
Alpha Centuri, our closest neighboring star, has collapsed. It’s not know exactly why, but it’s theorized that some other star collapsed further out from Alpha Centuri and this has set up a chain reaction of gravity waves, very, very strong gravity waves. We read about the effect the first small waves that hit the Earth from both sides. On one side, where the wave firsts smacks the earth, thing quickly become unpleasant to say the least. You certainly don’t want to carrying anything during this gravity event. Then on the other side, staying firmly grounded isn’t as easy as it used to be. And this was with just the first wave. There should be two more and a scientist character has calculated that the Earth should, should be able to survive the third wave, maybe!
I don’t think the author spent much time describing the action. He did kind of tell us what was happening to some people and things around our main characters, but he certainly didn’t go into detail. It was also difficult to really tell what was happening to the US Air Force jet fighter that was apparently caught in one of the waves. I mean, it crashed, but I don’t think it was clear as to why and what happen to the Russian fighter jets that were following. Those kind of details left the book much shorter than it could have been.
I noticed the title says “Pulse, #1) which makes me think there may be a follow-on book. It might be interesting to see where it goes from here, but this book pretty much closed out the three wave scenario. If you’re in-between books, this would make a very quick and good read.