"A scientist awakens from a thirty-day cryogenic experiment...twelve million years in the future."
I love a good thriller, and this looked like a combination of The Planet Of The Apes and The Omega Man, and I was up for that. Such high hopes - Such a disappointing mess.
Steve Alten has written many science/fantasy thrillers, including MEG (Megaloden, a giant prehistoric shark) and The Loch (the Loch Ness monster). Reviewers have called him a huckster and his writing "terrible". I found it badly written, with plots changing by the page.
It's 2022 - after The Great Die Off. Oil production has peaked and ceased, economies collapsed, endless wars have broken out, and Robert Eisenbraun is roaming the Blue Ridge Mountains hiding from the SS (raving sociopathic survivors) - gangs of crazed murdering and raping wild people that the population has become. He meets a Seminole Indian woman who is tough and hot, and by page 15 they are naked and entwined. She finds out he was a nuclear scientist working with the Pentagon on a fusion energy project that mines helium-3 from the Moon using drones run by a super computer named GOLUM, which Robert the boy genius designed.
All this in the first 2 chapters, 20 pages of the book, and I'm just skimming the highlights.
Cut to 2028, when an asteroid is known to be coming close to Earth. The GOLUM project has a team of scientists go into cryogenic stasis for a trip to Jupiter's moon Europa, where they plan to harvest helium-3 under the frozen ocean. Their test base located deep under the Antarctic Ocean. GOLUM is warning one of the team is mentally unstable and sends Robert with the team to observe. The asteroid hits Earth's Moon while they are sleeping and he accidentally wakes up twelve million years in the future! ...Or is he still asleep?
The pod is under a deep ocean now with 300 foot waves, the cephlopods they had in the lab have grown into giant telepathic octopus creatures which roam the land upright, his girlfriend (who was also on the trip) has been cloned by the giant twisted future version of GOLUM, which now runs the Earth. She has been incorporated into half human half machine creatures that act as vehicles, soldiers, and workers for the computer. Or is she still alive? Or is he still dreaming? I could go on, but...
Alten manages to incorporate rants on Monsanto, the oil industry, and banks, with Joseph Mengele and Hitler's SS, alien holograms from the future (or are they?) who give him a bomb to destroy everything (or will it?), Jewish holy days and Rosh Hashanah, artificial wombs of the clone incubators, quotes from the Dalai Lama, giant spider women, trips to the Alpha Colony of several inhabited planets ~ and he uses the convenient "waking up from a nightmarish dream" scenario far too often... (or does he?)...
I was up for it all, but there was no character development or depth to it, nothing you could hang on to, the plot just rampaged on. I thought this was a mess, with the plot changing near the end almost with every page. It was hard to get through with my eyes rolling so much.
I gave it a shot.
2013 / Paperback / 432 pages
Comments