OK, before I get into my review of this book, I should point out that it's the second in the 'New Terra Sagas' series by Matthew O. Duncan. If you're a regular reader, you may well say, "Hang on, didn't you review 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix' last month, which was the second book in the 'New Terra Sagas' by Matthew O. Duncan?" Well, yes I did and there is an explanation for that, which is that the latter used to be but the former is now. This gets a little complicated, so settle down and I'll try to explain.

'The Warrior's Stone' was and remains the first book in what became a trilogy. The second book is 'The Prophet's Stone', after 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix' was repurposed as a standalone book set within the same universe, merely with a bunch of the same characters and locations in one of its key plot strands. The third and last is 'The King's Stone', which I'll tackle next month. However, Duncan has also written a separate 'Lt. Reilly' series of six volumes and counting, that is set in the same universe, with 'Major Mitchell and the Carplex Conspiracy' serving as another spinoff from the first spinoff.

Are you with me? Then I'll begin.

It's easy to see why Duncan retrofitted this into the 'New Terra Sagas' trilogy, because it sticks very much to the fantasy side of the franchise rather than the science fiction one. There aren't any military sci-fi subplots and strands of story. With the exception of a single scene on the TSS Yorktown and a couple of visits by Admiral Roche, this is all about New Terra and the stones and prophecies that sit at the heart of life there. The primary characters all belong to the families that run things there, not only Roy’s and Katreena's.

However, having said that, it doesn't remotely unfold in the way you might expect and I have to wonder about how it's going to factor into the third book. It's also going to be very difficult to avoid spoilers, given that the aspect I need to talk about most kind of counts as one. What I can say is that unlike 'The Warrior's Stone', which followed a single core story of the alien invasion of New Terra, this is about prophecy and how fundamental to life on New Terra it is. It would be trivial to dismiss literally half this book like we might dismiss the infamous season of 'Dallas' in which a year of programming turned out to be a dream, but that may not be fair.

Really, the most important character here by far is Queen Deoiridh, who has been dead for five-hundred years before any book in this series begins. She shows up in vision form at certain key points when other characters use the stones, in interactive form, to bolster the prophecies she's already left for specific people in the future. She did that in 'The Warrior's Stone' and it seems like she's been doing it at crucial moments over those five hundred years. However, the stakes have never been higher than now.

So, after we check back in with Roy ten years after 'The Warrior's Stone' (nine, according to the chronology) and two after 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix', to learn that King Aradorn is now his best friend and mentor who has been teaching him how to use the stones, a storm hits. It's not a long storm but it hits hard before vanishing and it takes all the T-Class plasma with it. It's that plasma that makes New Terra what it is, so all of that stops. The hum Katreena remembers as a constant is gone. The stones don't work anymore, so she can't heal anyone with them. And the asteroids have all gone dark. The magic is gone.

Of course, Queen Deoiridh saw this coming half a millennium ago so Roy's guided down into the Vault of Time to read a sealed prophecy, which tells him that it's up to him to save the day. He's to travel to a new continent to effectively press a magic undo button and bring the plasma back. He's the only one who can do it, because he's the only one with a spaceship, but it's also crucial that he be of the right blood to use the stones. And so we're in motion. We have a setup and an important mission and off goes Roy to take care of it. It's the sort of thing we expected.

Except that I'm pretty sure that we expected that plot strand to be the novel. Surely I'm not the only one? The first spoiler I'll throw out here is that it isn't. Roy fulfils his mission within a vast empty city in which the Two Suns Empire thrived until being wiped out three hundred years ago by a single rash act, but he does it in twenty pages. It has to be the quickest and easiest mission of his entire life and he spent much of it in the Alliance military. We aren't even ninety pages in and we're apparently done. I actually checked to see if this was a novella with something more filling the rest of the trade paperback.

Well, no, it isn't. It's a novel and, while Roy did fulfil his mission and doing so did bring back the T-Plasma to New Terra, it did so by resetting time and nothing's quite the same. Suddenly, the Two Suns are back and they have a prophecy of their own that says that they must kill both him and his people. In this timeline, they've been planning an invasion for thirty years that's going to launch right now. Suddenly everyone's dead or taken, except for Katreena and Timothy, her son with Roy, who escape in his shuttle after she initiates an emergency protocol. Now we're on board the Yorktown, discovering her dead body in the shuttle and sending Timothy to live with his aunt Vickie, who runs an antique shop back on Earth.

Needless to say, I wasn't expecting any of that. When Admiral Roche visits to provide Vickie with a translation device to enable her and Timothy to converse, he tells her that the entire planet is confirmed drowned in radiation. Everybody is dead except Timothy. Talk about a tonal shift! It's utterly brutal. And, in only a few more pages than it took for Roy to complete his mission, we're suddenly on Earth with Timothy going to school and learning how to speak English. We might be forgiven for wondering how 'New Terras Saga' is a trilogy when New Terra is wiped out less than halfway into this new book two.

Well, there's where I'll shut up because we're well into spoiler territory and I should leave some semblance of story for you to discover yourself. I had to come this far with my synopsis because every reader of 'The Warrior's Stone' and indeed 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix', would expect this book to be about Roy and Katreena, which it isn't. Sure, they both have key parts to play in the story, but they're short ones early in the book, Katreena's as brief as saving her son with a healing stone, after Roy restores power to all the stones. Timothy has just as important part to play and the bulk of the book follows him. By page count, this is his book, just as by importance, it's Queen Deoiridh's.

I won't say much about Timothy's time on Earth. I will say that he grows up with Joy, a daughter of a neighbour, who becomes a major part of his life. I will say that he spends some time with a retired Alliance soldier called Sam Carter—so 'Stargate SG-1' is another of Duncan's favourite shows, I presume—who used to have an unrequited crush on his dad, and she helps him to move forward. I will say that Carl Roche and Juan Fernandez from 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix' are fleeting characters here too, at crucial moments in Timothy's life.

I'll also say that I didn't find Duncan's writing as good in these scenes set on Earth. It highlights how he relies on character above everything, fleshing out stories with exposition, because it's a lot easier for us to see what isn't there when things are set on Earth where we expect a certain background ambience. We don't get much in the way of description, with locations given much less attention than characters. I'm not even sure where Vickie's shop is located, other than the United States, and there's no way to figure it out from context clues. We spend time in Chester later on, the one in England, but it could be anywhere. It really doesn't matter. What matters are the characters.

And that's why, however much exposition and however little description Duncan gives us, not to forget lots of large skips forward in time, the emotion is always there. Damn, this one gets very emotional indeed, and I'm not just talking about the pivotal moments when primary characters have to make crucial decisions that have massive ramifications for everything around them. I'm talking about everyday scenes too. I may know nothing about the classroom or the school or the city they're located in on Timothy's first day in school, but I felt them emotionally. The same can be said for what he finds in the locked shed or the decisions he and Joy choose about their lives or the moment he learns about his powers. And, of course, his crucial moment is so emotional it may make you cry. I was pretty damn close myself.

So that's 'The Prophet's Stone', a rather brave book from Matthew O. Duncan that shows what power he can bring to a page but also some of what he can't do. Oddly, given that outrageous tonal shift that makes over half of the book feel like it was replaced by another book entirely, it's also a much more focused story, merely on what prophecy means to New Terrans. I'm now a lot more intrigued about what's to come in 'The King's Stone' than when I started.

Given that I found a lot of fault with the production values of 'The Warrior's Stone', I should say that most of those problems are solved here. Not only does this boast a cover without an ounce of pixellation, it's an absolutely gorgeous front cover, courtesy of Donna Harriman Murillo. The use of indents and smartquotes is consistent now, though the blank line between paragraphs is back, having been mostly solved in 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix'. The proofing is much better too, as I only counted three instances of homophones not being caught by the spellchecker, so a "vile" for "vial", a "past" for "passed" and a "due" for "do". Had I not been a proofreader, they wouldn't have registered. They certainly won't interfere with the flow for a regular reader.

So, next up is 'The King's Stone', which I also bought from the author at Phoenix Fan Fusion last week, along with his 'Lt. Reilly' series. I'll review that in July, then decide if I want to continue into those books or let them sit for a while. After all, there are so many Arizona authors and so little time to explore them. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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