What would you do if the world was going to end in ten years? For Jennifer Epstein, a by-the-books senior researcher at SETI, there is only one answer: prevent the apocalypse from happening. Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus were destroyed by an alien threat. The deck was stacked against humanity before the cards came out of the box.But Jennifer isn’t alone. She has Samantha Monroe, her excitable but … excitable but brilliant colleague. From South Africa, CEO Muzikayise Khulu of Khulu Global supplies his vast resources to the ultimate race for survival. The three find themselves in an unlikely alliance while political brinkmanship, doomsday cults, and untested technologies form ever-growing obstacles.
Will humanity unite to face the greatest challenge of their time, or will it destroy itself before the alien ship arrives?
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If this was a movie Jeff Goldblum would be in it
My overall impression of this book is that it read like a B disaster flick – which I happen to like 😉 Starting in our near past and moving into a future where the US president is never actually named, it could conceivably be a parallel earth.
It was a grand apocalyptic saga, with a very narrow focus. The story followed only a handful of characters and largely ignored the larger implications of the situation. Primarily it was the story of the woman who stumbled on the discovery, her partner, and a few people they interacted with. One of the most interesting of these was an AI. They were in a position to make key decisions that had grand repercussions despite not being powerful influential people themselves..
At times I did not like how limited this story was, but by the end I came to appreciate the story the author crafted and can see why it was told in this way. The romance as well seemed superfluous when it was introduced, but came to play an integral part in the plot.
It is a long book, but one that feels like much care was taken to craft and edit the story the author wanted to tell.
(Review based on a free giveaway copy)
TL;DR: In Trevor B. Williams’s debut novel, humanity is faced with a catastrophe in the form of an alien threat: part nightmare, part riddle, and part call to scientific and political action. While the writing suffers from “first book” issues and the main characters’ endings felt forced, the story’s concept and the explanation for the alien behavior were so enjoyable that I strongly recommend this book for any hard sci-fi fan or first contact enthusiast.
Main Review: How does one search for extraterrestrial intelligence, when one’s conception of intelligence is limited to an effective sample size of one planet? And how does one contend with that intelligence, especially when obviously destructive actions may not be malicious? By what method can the ant deter the bulldozer? And what happens when the coming crisis is slow enough that we have to keep dealing with daily life, even as doom creeps toward us?
Eternal Shadow, the debut novel by Trevor B. Williams, offers a fascinating take on all these questions.
A story of such epic, almost Asimovian scale must be grounded by a human element, and so we follow the journeys of three characters. Samantha Monroe and Jennifer Epstein are SETI researchers, the former of which discovers a signal emanating from just beyond Pluto at the story’s beginning. Muzikayise Khulu is a corporate titan, kind of an Elon Musk/Bill Gates of South Africa. As the signal’s source, dubbed the “Leviathan”, obliterates Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus in a matter of days before mysteriously turning toward Earth at much lower speed, we follow these three characters over a span of years as they race to understand the Leviathan’s motive, and—most importantly—how to stop it from destroying our world.
Eternal Shadow is definitely hard sci-fi. Aside from the imaginative leaps for the Leviathan’s existence and Khulu Global, the story makes no fanciful assumptions. Every technique and technology presented has a basis in the scientific literature, and many are built from existing projects. The world is grounded in our own reality of 2014 and beyond, to the point where political regimes track along with the story, with surprisingly little disruption. (For example, Trump is still elected in 2016.) Mr. Williams has obviously done his homework, though, offering the reader technical details on such items as the position and velocity of the Leviathan, as well as the construction of the probes and engines humanity inevitably sends to study it. Aside from incorrectly stating that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory was in Virginia (I know it’s in West Virginia because I’ve been there), I was happy to trust his descriptions.
But for a doomsday scenario, the world is painfully slow to react, to the point that multiple times, I saw the Leviathan as an allegory for climate change. While this would be fine with me, it did distract me from the first contact premise of the book somewhat. Perhaps the bigger issue was that I had trouble feeling the emotions of the characters as they grappled with what would surely be a nightmare scenario, if not for the masses, then for those in the know. Aside from a few key scenes, I felt that Jennifer and Sam were more concerned with the technical aspects of monitoring the Leviathan’s approach than with the emotional ramifications. I found Muzikayise’s development more interesting, becoming philanthropic, but always with an ambiguity about how much he hoped to personally gain from humanity’s survival as he went all-in to fund a defense. The support characters were either hyper-realistic (Mr. Williams uses well-known names from the Obama administration, for example, causing me a strange feeling of dissonance as I tried to imagine what their IRL counterparts would think), or they were caricatures (for example, the trope of the doomsday cultist who hates all things scientific and progressive). Minor spoilers, but in my opinion, the most lively and engaging support characters were nonhuman. I found many characters’ voices had a tendency to blend together, leading me to reread multiple exchanges to be sure of who was saying what. Perhaps this contributed to my frustration with the ending, or rather, the focus of the ending. Without going into spoilers, I was far more interested in whether humanity’s attempt to defeat the Leviathan would succeed, but a few characters’ seemingly random decisions, followed by a contrived (or lucky, in-world) sequence of events, were so sudden and strange that it temporarily broke my suspension of disbelief.
With respect to the writing itself, I was surprised by the density of typos (strange jumps between past and present tense, for example), and I believe the book would have benefitted greatly from one more copy edit. I found myself having to reread sentences just to parse out their meaning, because while technically correct, they were dense, much like academic writing often is. While this contributed nicely to the overall hard sci-fi feel of the story, it did make the reading more laborious. A casual reader would almost certainly skim through the details and miss half the interesting stuff.
All that said, I still enjoyed Eternal Shadow, so much so that I highly recommend it to the patient reader and sci-fi enthusiast. The concept is excellent, and the eventual explanation of the Leviathan’s behavior and how to contend with it is equally excellent. (Aside from its slow approach to Earth after leaping around the outer solar system; I never did get a clear sense of that logic.) I couldn’t put the book down once I got past a critical point, because I needed to see how things resolved, for better or worse. And, in the cosmic sense, I found the ending very satisfying.
Eternal Shadow stands as an excellent debut novel for Mr. Williams, and for the reader that can forgive “first-book” issues, it’s a read well worth your time. I’m looking forward to his follow-up work.