I’ve mentioned before that good cover art or a clever title tend to pull me in.  I cannot quite get over the cover art for this title.  I can’t decide what was intended by art that looks like a pulp cover from the 1950s.  And it isn’t tied to anything in the story.  Okay, I’ve got that off my chest…

The story starts with Lieutenant Selene Genji, from Earth’s Unified Fleet, observing the result of a terrible civil war when the Spear of Humanity decides that blowing up the whole Earth is the solution to their goals.  The power, unleashed by Earth’s death, warps space and time and propels her back in time by forty years.

Lieutenant Kayl Owen, from Earth Guard, is on a routine patrol when her ship’s wreckage simply appears out of nowhere.  And, almost as shocking, he finds a living survivor – Genji.

The problem begins with the fact that Owen’s report of her ship’s wreckage just appearing is not taken seriously; it seems that history has made Owen something of a black sheep in the fleet.  And it doesn’t help his peace of mind when he discovers that Lt Genji is certain he is part of the bad guys’ faction and that there isn’t any way she could possibly be forty years in her past.  The only thing that might convince her is seeing the Earth; but they are a long way from home. And it doesn’t make his official statement any more believable when Genji insists she has alien DNA.

Once Genji and Owen both accept the other’s story, Genji tries to convert Owen to her ‘new’ mission: saving Earth.  She believes that her present was the result of several different things happening that set the stage for the existence of the “Spear of Humanity”, their possession of a planet-busting weapon, and peoples’ general malaise and apathy about their governments.  She doesn’t know exactly what will need to be changed but she knows she can make a start with the event of “first contact” with the alien species, the Tramontine – whose DNA she carries.

This First Contact is going to happen very soon so Genji has to make her way to Mars somehow and then try to contact the negotiators so that mistakes can be avoided; the biggest is the assumption of hostile alien intent, and nothing is further from the truth.  Once Owen is firmly in her court, he finds contacts that still respect him and are willing to help; particularly a sympathetic retired Admiral in Earth Guard.

One might imagine that once she had proved both her loyalty and truthfulness, Earth Guard would treat her and Owen with gratitude.  But if one were the author, then one would continue to throw the protagonists to wolves.  One of the things (in the future) that Genji dreads the most is how her kind were treated as things by the general population.  She keeps anticipating people’s reactions when the humans of this time are curious but kind.  She has a lot of trouble separating their acceptance of her as a “full human” with the regard she grew up with.  It appears that her mere appearance ahead of the alien contact may change peoples’ perception.  This was a positive note that ended when the usual haters got their blood up with a nice new target: an alien hybrid. 

Genji comes to believe that once she makes enough changes to stop the Earth’s destruction, then she would cease to exist as she wouldn’t have been born.  This makes her very fatalistic.  It makes Owen crazy as he tries to grapple with his increasing affection/respect/love for her, with the very desperate need to save the Earth; even at her expense.

I enjoyed the race to get to Mars in time to prepare the negotiators; which, of course, confused the aliens as to how the humans could possibly know anything of them.  And I enjoyed what was a typical chase scene as Earth Guard attempts to capture them and they attempt to escape.  But what I most enjoyed were the obvious changes engendered by both Owen’s and Genji’s actions (the lack of which created the toxic society that destroyed itself) that weren’t even noticed by our protagonists.  They were there for the reader.  One of the earliest tiny changes at the beginning was obvious to this reader and I felt excited to witness it.

The real question is how will Genji and Owen know they’ve made enough changes to prevent the catastrophe forty years in their future?  Will Genji simply cease to exist, would Owen remember any of it…or, will she continue to exist but they will never know the effect of their efforts until forty years later?  And, of course, since this is clearly marked Book One, it ends on a cliffhanger.  We don’t yet know those answers and I predict we won’t for as long as the author can keep the series going; and he has a lot of series under his belt.

Overall, I would say I like this story; it was a bit of a standard science fiction story that is really a suspense story dressed up with future tech.  The author is an experienced writer and that professionalism is clearly present in his prose.  The plot was well-devised which easily supported the protagonists’ characters and goals.  The dialogue was perfect; something that an amateur writer always goofs up.  I’d be happy to continue with this series for a while; I might get more impressed.  ~~  Catherine Book

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