A Dystopian thriller that’s not for the squeamish.
Set at some unspecified point in the near future, Year of the Flood follows a loosely-connected group of characters trying to navigate and survive a dystopian future. The world is run by corporations who happy to carry out genetic research on the population and extinguishing any people or groups who get in their way. One of these groups is the Gardeners – a church of religious vegans who believe that the world will be decimated by the flood: a global pandemic that will kill a sizeable proportion of the world’s population.
And as it turns out, they were right on the money.
The trouble with eBooks is that it’s pretty difficult to judge how big they are. I picked up Noumenon and thought it was going to be a pretty average-sized science-fiction novel.
Well it wasn’t that. This book is epic. It was one of those book that felt like you’d been reading it for years. I don’t mean that in a bad way; the book was absolutely brilliant. It’s just that the pacing was so good, and the characters so well-defined, it felt like I was living every minute of the adventure.
Convoy Seven is a fleet of twelve ships dispatched from Earth in the middle of the 22nd century. The plan is to travel to a nearby star that, according to long-range scans, may be encased in an artificial structure (a Dyson Sphere, if you’re interested). As this is the first real possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy, the fleet, crewed by one hundred thousand clones of astronauts and scientists, is sent on a three hundred year round trip to investigate the star. And as if three centuries wasn’t long enough, due to space/time dilation caused by travelling faster than light; three thousand years will have passed on Earth by the time the convoy returns.
