Abduction by Robin Cook

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was an amusing look at one person’s imagined Utopia. After a group of deep sea divers get sucked into an unknown world deep underwater, we are introduced to a perfect society.

I did not particularly care for any of the characters in this book, which may have made it easier to suspend my disbelief and just go with the flow. The writing was highly accessible and the descriptions of the undersea world were solid.

I picked this up because I am familiar with the author, but did not recognize this as a title I had previously read. I still prefer his medical thrillers to this book, but it was an entertaining afternoon read.

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The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce

Another haunting read. This one with an actual ghost. The Afterlives is a subtle blend of technological fiction and an investigation into life after death. When Jim Byrd dies (for several minutes), he sees “nothing, no lights, no tunnel, no angels.” This sends him on a quest to investigate the afterlife.

This story takes place in the near future and deals with some technological fiction including a phone app that monitors Jim’s heart and guest lectures from holograms. These technological innovations play only a supporting role in the book, but they are there and for me, make “the machine” more plausible.

While Jim and his wife, Annie, are exploring possible answers to their big philosophical questions, they track down and find a woman who claims to have invented a machine that allows people to communicate with dead loved ones. Her explanation is that people are only ever 93% in this world anyhow. A stretch, but interesting nonetheless.

Between Jim’s existential wanderings, there is an older story of the ghost before she was a ghost. I found myself looking forward to these interludes. The dead woman’s story is told through multiple perspectives, truly giving the reader a sense of her time and place in history. The tying together of past and future was handled masterfully.

While the characters were delightfully flawed, I found them to be believable and their quest an entertaining one. As a person who has experienced loss, I find talk of the next life or what happens after our bodies are no longer viable, fascinating. The concept that we are only ever 93% in this world was difficult for me to grasp. But I do find it sticks with me as I spend more time mulling it over.

This was Pierce’s debut novel, and I will keep him on my radar for future adventures.

The Drowned World

I am glad I read the edition of The Drowned World with an introduction by Martin Amis. I found Amis’s essay about the book and how it fit into history enlightening. The idea of prescience in literature is not new, but it was a fresh concept for me.

The Drowned World is one horrific view of a world destroyed by man’s negligence. Of course, the world isn’t destroyed, but man’s ability to continue living there is drastically impaired. As always, nature adapts in amazing ways.

This was a short book about an Earth that no longer has cities, in which most of the land has been swallowed by water and the temperature is ever-rising. Fifty some years ago, this was probably not a common idea. With the rise of Global Warming and other environmental concerns addressed by the media every day, the idea of water encroaching our own habitat is less far-flung.

There was some excellent imagery throughout the novel, but one that struck me was: “So his descent into the phantasmagoric forest continued, the rain sweeping relentlessly across his face and shoulders. Sometimes it would stop abruptly, and clouds of steam filled the intervals between the trees hanging over the waterlogged floor like diaphanous fleeces, only dispersing when the downpour resumed.” (p. 192) I could easily imagine taking this walk with Kerans as he escapes.

This is certainly not a character study and many of the characters could have been fleshed out into a longer novel. Instead, this was a cautionary tale and a reminder to me that the idea of rising water levels is not new.