2 out of 4 stars
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30th Century Escape by Mark Kingston Levin begins in the 30th century a mile below sea level where Captain Jennifer Hero heads fifty members of a Secret Society of natural humans on an important mission. Society consists of natural humans and Syndos who have enhanced DNA to make them stronger and physically superior but lack a moral compass. Syndos have decided to wipe out the naturals and the naturals have a non-violent plan to prevent this happening by travelling back to the 27th century, when the Syndos were first created to make sure they develop a sense of morality.
Under heavy attack, Jennifer sends her team back in time to the 27th century but when she enters the time machine she does not send herself to the same time, but goes further back to 2015, to an era of history she has studied in-depth. Her time capsule takes her to the ocean near Muroroa Atoll in French Polynesia and Jennifer swims ashore leaving her capsule on the ocean floor and spends the next four months surviving alone on the atoll that was abandoned following French nuclear testing that took place there from the 1960s to 1996.
A research team headed by Professor Marty Zitonick finds her and she claims she has amnesia and can remember nothing before waking on Muroroa about four months earlier other than her name. The rest of the novel details her experience living in the 21st century where she gets accepted to University and meets a variety of people, many of which she has a range of sexual encounters with. She looks like a girl with a similar name who disappeared with her parents when cruising on their yacht, and many of the people she meets believe she is the same girl who went missing. At the end of the book it returns to the science fiction beginning and picks up on what happened with her team and the mission.
The beginning of the book was an action-packed science fiction time-travel story that was powerfully written, but the rest of the book did not live up to its early promise for me. The next part detailed how she survived alone and was reasonably entertaining, but half-way through the book it became a steamy erotic novel which seemed to add nothing to the original story and left me wondering who the intended audience is. I would happily have let a young teenager read the early parts but not the rest.
The end of the story seems rushed and ends very abruptly. Even though it is book one of a trilogy I would have preferred something that had a more satisfying conclusion. I also thought that some of the content was completely irrelevant and superfluous to the story such as the time the yacht they are on burns down to the water. Perhaps part 2 or 3 of the trilogy link back to this event, but after reading I was just left wondering why it happened.
There are a few typos and grammar errors such as “ .. then spoke with his five and daughter..” when five should be wife, and things that made no sense such as “..gold from around 1700 not Nazi gold..” when that era was pre-Nazi . However the most annoying thing about the book for me was the fact that everyone is welcoming and kind and rather one-dimensional. It is hard to believe that everyone Jennifer meets is completely accepting of having sex in groups with multiple partners. In reality there are always mean and nasty people and I felt the characters weren’t very realistic. On the positive side the book has some lovely descriptions of locations and some nice theoretical physics.
I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. I loved the beginning and was disappointed that it became erotica that added nothing to the original storyline. It seemed an incongruous match and the ending was very rushed. In addition it needs another round of editing and most of the characters were not realistic enough and served no purpose in the story other than being somebody else to have sex with. I don’t know who the intended audience is as most of my SF-reading friends would find a lot of it uninteresting, and many erotica readers would wonder where the beginning was going.
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30th Century: Escape
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