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Thursday 10 May 2012

Book Review: Convergent Space by John Paul Cleary

The Galaxy was living in peace and harmony benevolently controlled, protected, and guided by The Guild.

200 years ago The Aveche threatened the peace and tranquillity of the planets within The Guild.  Earth as the founders and most technologically advanced Planet develop a Shield that will encompass all of the Galaxy's and systems within The Guild, and after millions of relay stations are set up it is time to put the Shield in place.

The Earth fleet sets out with the final part but before it can be put in place  a Great (shock) Wave spreads through known space destroying millions of planets and trillions of lives.

Earth is blamed for the catastrophe and ostracised and a new ruling class is born in the The Renaissance.

Earth spends the next 200 years sending out Archeosoldiers to track what actually happened in the belief that their technology and the Shield could not have caused the disaster, no one believed them.......

Convergent Space then, turns out to be a futuristic inter galaxy archaeological detective story, with one person Archeosoldiers sent out in their ships with nothing more than a micro companion, which is connected to them wirelessly from birth, and dies when its human companion dies.

As large parts of the remaining galaxy are still in turmoil and planetary wars and civil wars are ongoing, the attrition rate of the Archeosoldiers is high.  Rone, a female Archeosoldier was badly injured during her quest and had managed to get assigned to a Renaissance station and was living with the leader of that part of space until a badly wounded soldier turns up in her front room.

She likes the life she is living and feels that Earth needs to forget its past and move on as no one really cares any more, but the Quest has become a religion on the home planet and all resources are geared to that and that alone.  The injured soldier dies but not before giving Rone information that could lead her to the truth of what happened two centuries ago.

She reluctantly takes up her old life and sets off in pursuit of the quest only to stumble upon a new threat to what's left of the Galaxy.  Humans, Phlegars, Hernesses are just some of the seemingly humanoid like species living in this mixed up star system.

The truth is finally revealed and the climax to the story is horrific, can history be repeated?

Over all I found it a little bit slow in places but, that was made up for in the overall story which has a bit of a twist to it that many people may find intriguing.

Putting it into today's setting (and whether the author intended to or not, I have no idea) The Renaissance, are probably the bankers who now control the system, francising out chunks of space to individuals and corporations but their actual power is proved to be a myth.  The Phlegars are the itinerants of the system, who have a dark secret that even they don't know about and the Hernesses are the Occupy Movement who will stop, only just short of genocide (except against one race) to rebalance the system for the betterment of everyone.  And humans, well we have just turned out to be blamed for all the ills that makes the system what it is and are ignored and hated by everyone in power... much like we peasants are today by both Governments and Businesses!

There were a couple of errors* in the book not story line but grammatical and spelling, but not as many as some I have recently read and if the author sorts these out

Editing for Kindle: 4 out of 5*
Reading Enjoyment: 4 out of 5
Page length on kindle: 348
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

John Paul Cleary can be found here 


Convergent Space can be purchased at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here 

1 comment:

  1. I'm quite interested in this book. It's on my to buy list.

    ReplyDelete

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