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A review by pjonsson
Overture by Mark Wandrey
3.0
I do have a few issues with this book but on the whole it was a fairly nice read.
It is a mix between a humanity-discovers-there’s-life-in-space story and a apocalypse story. The entire book is pretty much a set-up for books to come. I guess this is a bit of a spoiler but given that the author pretty much discloses the outcome on the first few pages it’s really not that much of a spoiler. Anyway, by the end of the book Earth is gone, literally, and what remains of humanity is … elsewhere.
This book is all about the events that leads up to this point. The discovery of the pending apocalypse, the portals, the escape and, not very surprisingly, a lot of the stupidity of human behavior. The latter are the parts that I really was not to thrilled about.
The book is well written, the characters are not bad at all and, on the whole, the story is captivating. I do like these mystery/discovery/build-up kind of stories. Of course the author had to drag in CERN which is always a mistake since no one seems to be able to look up actual facts. How bloody hard can it be to do some research, for instance where the actual geographical location of the laboratory is? Hint, it is in Switzerland with some parts of it in France. I did like the stab he made at the global warming fanatics though.
The parts I am not so thrilled about is that he threw in some fanatical cultists that were allowed to screw things up the way these kind of lunatics usually screw things up. Boring and not very fun reading. Then we just had to get some internal FBI and NSA conspiracies crap as well. To top it all of there was the utterly unbelievable stupidity of some nations (one in particular) who managed to almost make humanity extinct by themselves. Come on, if the author had just chosen some of the well known totally deluded nations of fanatics like North Korea or Iran it might have been half believable but no…
Okay, those parts aside, I have to say I quite enjoyed this read. Given the finality of certain things at the end of the book I am also quite eager to see where the story goes from here.
It is a mix between a humanity-discovers-there’s-life-in-space story and a apocalypse story. The entire book is pretty much a set-up for books to come. I guess this is a bit of a spoiler but given that the author pretty much discloses the outcome on the first few pages it’s really not that much of a spoiler. Anyway, by the end of the book Earth is gone, literally, and what remains of humanity is … elsewhere.
This book is all about the events that leads up to this point. The discovery of the pending apocalypse, the portals, the escape and, not very surprisingly, a lot of the stupidity of human behavior. The latter are the parts that I really was not to thrilled about.
The book is well written, the characters are not bad at all and, on the whole, the story is captivating. I do like these mystery/discovery/build-up kind of stories. Of course the author had to drag in CERN which is always a mistake since no one seems to be able to look up actual facts. How bloody hard can it be to do some research, for instance where the actual geographical location of the laboratory is? Hint, it is in Switzerland with some parts of it in France. I did like the stab he made at the global warming fanatics though.
The parts I am not so thrilled about is that he threw in some fanatical cultists that were allowed to screw things up the way these kind of lunatics usually screw things up. Boring and not very fun reading. Then we just had to get some internal FBI and NSA conspiracies crap as well. To top it all of there was the utterly unbelievable stupidity of some nations (one in particular) who managed to almost make humanity extinct by themselves. Come on, if the author had just chosen some of the well known totally deluded nations of fanatics like North Korea or Iran it might have been half believable but no…
Okay, those parts aside, I have to say I quite enjoyed this read. Given the finality of certain things at the end of the book I am also quite eager to see where the story goes from here.