Andrew Man's Blog: Tego Arcana Dei Series, page 3

Cultnoise Review by Amy Cope

Beyond the Rest of Us is described as a magical, mysterious and fast-paced action thriller. It follows the exploits of the protagonist James Pollack who has a dark past in banking, a difficult history with Italian women and an unpredictable ability to astral travel.

In this story, James is kidnapped back to 1814 and has to use all his skills to uncover the corrupt European operation against the backdrop of a disintegrating and unscrupulous world. The story looks at the crumbling economy and the conflicts in the Middle East and the part the West had to play in them. We cross continents, eras and astral planes on this journey and meet a variety of James’ friends and enemies.

We get a glimpse into how string theory can explain multiple universes and some of the theories as to what the pyramids in Egypt really are. There is a very anthropological dialogue about the origins of humans and the evolution from Mitochondrial Eve, there are interactive holograms and a benevolent overseer guru who seems to control who and what appears where to help James to solve the mystery of SIG.

There has been a tremendous amount of research put into this book, the science and conspiracy theories are contemporary and as far as I can tell (not being a physicist) mostly correct. However, I found that the plot was often lost in the pursuit of getting the science in, particularly about CERN and their accelerators and the theory of man’s evolution and the possibility of travel through time and space. It did provide me with some interesting information and there are parts of the research that are subtly brilliant.

Near the beginning of the book, James is talking to his friend about a meeting with a British Prime Minister which was secret and ‘not even Denis knew about’. These little clues let you know which PM James had a meeting with without mentioning her name. The information that Andrew Man uses in this book is incredible. Things that you read about in the news are in there and while they might not be linked to the plot, they are talked about, which firmly roots this book in this decade.

I had not read the other books in the Tego Arcana Dei series and after getting 15 pages into this book, I thought it might be better to go back and read the first two so I could have an understanding of what was happening. Having read the works, I can say that it is a science fiction series, substantial on the science and conspiracy theories and the majority of the female characters are James Pollack’s conquests. There are some sex scenes in this book; not particularly long or detailed but heavy on male satisfaction, with a variety of women. However, all do shine a spotlight on the current world climate.

The title of the series roughly translates to “Begone, I conceal the secrets of God” and is an anagram of “Et in Arcadia Ego” (And in Arcadia I go) which was represented on a painting by Poussin in the early 1600’s called ‘The Arcadian Shepherds’, which is a common theme throughout the books.

Cultnoise: www.cultnoise.com/book-review-beyond-...

Midnyte Reader, November 24, 2015

Guest Post Andrew Man – Dystopian Adventures vs. Conspiracy Thrillers.

Over the last few years, young adult dystopian fiction has seen a spike in popularity with several young authors writing trilogies like The Hunger Games and Divergent which have become best-selling books and films. These ideas are in contrast to past conspiracy thrillers from writers like Dan Brown and the thought-provoking espionage novels of John Le Carré. Based on this rise in popularity between the two genres, I decided to write a fiction series which would be a modern day conspiracy thriller, with some of the dystopian ideas from the future. In this way, the reader is able to relate to the characters, in our current world and read about the same characters in a world fifty years in the future. These three books are both exciting and mind bending, leaving the reader wanting to know more. The final book will debut in November, so let’s take a closer look at the Tego Arcana Dei series.

Book 1 – Keeping God’s Secret (2011)

The British hero James Pollack meets a young American on a train in London who shows him events which he will have to do in his future life. Britain is suffering under a recession and James leaves to work for a bank in Switzerland– only to return to the Caribbean island of Antigua for a meeting. Her name is Gina; her client is the Commander of one of the world’s most powerful agencies. As the couple plunge into a dizzying, mystical adventure, American powers collide with secrets at the Vatican summer palace. The story takes James back to the shadowy corridors of Italian Banking, leading him on to an archeologically dig on the coast of Lebanon, where he finds an ancient artefact. A magic blade enabling him to time travel to other dimensions, and so the real adventure starts.

Book 2 – Forces of Retribution (2013)

In this story’s most powerful, and heart stopping novel yet, James is at a hospital in Geneva, after major surgery from his time travel experiences. Locations move back to Lebanon, London, and onto the pyramids in Egypt in a desperate hunt to find the secret of quantum weirdness. The hunter is the passionate and resourceful James Pollack, an ex-Swiss banker who has an interest in science, the paranormal and women. His quarry is the young Italian Alexei, who has given up on her life and seeks his help to time travel from a Centre of Science in Switzerland, to the very heart of our Universe, fifty years into the future.

Book 3 – Beyond the Rest of Us (2015)

The final book is set in the current decade, when James now retired is kidnapped at a Geneva hotel for crimes he doesn’t understand and an Italian cruise ship crashes into rocks in the Tyrrhenian Sea. A respected American scientist disappears into thin air, but when the mist clears, we see mind control and astral travel in their dreams. Elizabeth the antagonist from the previous books, is still following a trail of corrupt power in this third book featuring Andrew Man’s aging male protagonist James Pollack.

The title of the series Tego Arcana Dei roughly translates to “Begone, I conceal the secrets of God” and is an anagram of “Et in Arcadia Ego.” This was represented in a painting by Poussin in the early 1600’s called ‘The Arcadian Shepherds’, and a common theme throughout the three books.

The Blogger Jaffa Reads Too…interview

Hello Andrew and welcome to Jaffa reads too…

What can you tell us about your book Beyond the Rest of Us?

Well, it’s the final book in a series about a modern world I barely know today. I decided to write the final book as a conspiracy thriller. This means for the average reader there is a good guy struggling to survive against difficult Government forces. This book also includes some ideas on the problems in Europe and climate change, as these ideas are inter-connected. Readers, who follow the concepts of Cosmogenesis and cosmology, will understand more.

Where did you get your inspiration for the story from – people, places or imagination?

I was sitting at a table in the village opposite a young school teacher who asked me if I had ever met important people during my time in Switzerland. I started to tell her the story about a discussion with Mrs Thatcher, years ago in the 80’s. So I have used ideas from both people and places from the past, often with a Sci-Fi twist. What I have written in this book is a short exposé of where we may have gone wrong – climate change and all.

Tell us three interesting things about your novel which will pique the reader’s interest?

• I used the second book in the series to describe a world fifty years in the future -this time I went back two hundred years to 1814. Writing historical chapters needs more research. I found links to Swiss Argand lamps before electricity and of course the Geneva connection to Mary Shelly’s novel ‘Frankenstein.’

• Most readers are familiar with the loss of the ‘Costa Concordia’ when it crashed onto rocks on an island off Italy. This was explained in the courts as an accident, but as an ex-banker it may have been something more sinister. Accidents will happen, but when stock markets are open, investors make big returns; of course this is all fiction.

• Time travel is always difficult to explain in any book, although it has been done better in films like ‘Déjà Vu’. That needed a huge machine and a lot of electricity, both of which we have in Switzerland at the Science Centre of CERN. I mentioned the story of Stephen Hawkins party in Cambridge where no one showed up. Is he still waiting for time travellers to appear? Time may be a lot more complicated than we see in our daily lives.

When do you find the time to write, and do you have a favourite place to do your writing?

Being retired has its advantages. Finding time to write is not difficult, but having to do research often slows me down for months. I do most reading, writing and online research in the winter, when the temperatures outside are below freezing. In summer it’s time for editing and correction. Details of some scenes can appear in dreams at night so I always keep a notepad next to my bed. This is what I call the ‘Connected Universe’ in my book.

What do you hope readers will take away from your novel?

Well first and foremost, I hope it may generate some interest in science and modern physics. I always include a list of books in the Acknowledgements at the end of each book, in the hope that a few readers may find at least one book of interest.

Can you tell us if you have another novel planned?

I had thought that when you write a trilogy that should be the end of the story. But then I see how events this year have got out of control in Europe and the Middle East and it would be easy to continue the series…? I’m keeping my options open for now.

Climate change: the debate rolls on and on…

Opinion for a Greener Life

By Andrew Man

Two years ago I read a book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz about the Apocalypse and how our species on this planet have faced extinctions in the past. I mentioned some of her ideas in my latest book “Beyond the Rest of Us” to be published in November.

I’m not a scientist, but an author who writes fiction books about science and thinks outside the box. I follow the latest ideas on Unified Physics – still a work in progress and our current ‘disconnected world view,’ that prevails over us all. It looks unlikely that the 2015 Climate Change Conference (COP 21/CMP 11) in Paris will find a solution. The UN’s Climate Chief tells us that all countries are pledging to do what is in their self-interest. The Paris Protocol will be the zero-ambition protocol, she says. Carbon reduction may be important but is not the only solution. From recent research, there may be unlimited clean energy in the empty vacuum of space. Maglev generators which mainline science thinks are impossible could provide unlimited clean power for us all, with more research. Perhaps Climate Change conferences are now a political game, trying to delay the reduction of carbon emissions until a new clean energy is available, but that may already be too late.

Climate change is of course very important; mass extinctions in the past were often the result of catastrophic events – meteor strikes, mega-volcanoes, that set off the change. Has anyone noticed that these events have been far outside human control in the past and probably will be in the future? The planet’s biosphere is an intensely changeable thing constantly swinging between wild extremes for millions of years. The two times Homo sapiens has survived extinction in the last millions years, was mainly luck; there was nothing they could do about it and that appears to be about where we are now. Despite the on-going political horse-trading over emissions targets, each piece of new scientific research offers further evidence that no feasible reduction in the emissions can now effectively mitigate the carbon crisis. With limited time for action, an increasingly influential minority of climate scientists are exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the biosphere, so desperation is finally setting in!

Let’s stop a minute and see where we really are. We live on a very small planet rotating around a sun which drags our solar system around our galaxy; by something know as spiral dynamics. So while the delegates at the Paris conference sit down to discuss climate change they will be moving 2.5 million miles a day through empty space. Our Earth-Sun system has always been moving in an orbit at 450,000 miles/hour, which in turn is travelling through space at 1.3 million miles/hour for millions of years. This velocity is important as rocks large and small pass through our heliosphere and caused untold damage in the past to planets and moons. Because of gravity we appear to be sitting at rest, but we are far from safe or secure from the climate change a direct meteor strike would cause. NOAA – the US National Climate Data Center, has found an abrupt climate change 14,000 years ago when the Northern Hemisphere climate suddenly warmed, at the time of the Younger Dryas. Evidence of the transition from the last glacial period, when the continental ice sheets were rapidly melting can be seen, but what caused that to happen is less clear.

To find scientific reports on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is easy, but finding agreement by geological societies has been a lot more difficult. The confusion has left the way for self-styled archaeologists like Graham Hancock, to provide evidence in his books that there was a lost civilisation dating back to a time before the last ice age. I don’t want to spoil his story, but he believes the planet was hit by fragments of a huge rock that helped melt the North American and European ice-caps and changed our climate to the present interglacial period. The fact that rapid climate change also brought about the extinction of North American animals and fauna at that time has been found, but did an extra-terrestrial impact start the climate change we see today. If this hypothesis is correct, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference would be about 10,000 years too late!

Every year at about this time, our planet travels through the Taurid stream and amateur astronomers look to the night sky to watch the harmless ‘Halloween firework’ display as Earth’s orbit passes through the meteor stream. This year however NASA scientists will be watching the Halloween flyby of asteroid 2015 TB145. This will pass the Earth at a safe distance of about 1.3 times the distance to our moon. The real problem is that it was only discovered on October 10 from a telescope in Hawaii. We may not be the first humans to experience an asteroid strike, but we may be the first to watch it happen from space.

New Novelist

New revised edition…

“TEGO ARCANA DEI” – Keeping God's Secret

Following the first publication of the book last year, this new revised version includes more details of God’s Secret, to support and enhance unexplained mysteries in the conclusion. The story is an intimate look at how human relationships changed in the 21st Century, leading humanity into a path-dependent world. It is a fictional story from the banking crisis of the 80’s to the Middle East wars of the new century. New facts and ideas have been added to help the reader understand the story that Governments, church and your bank do not want you to read?

Listen to the podcast

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About The Book

Exciting adventure story inspired by real-life events includes tales of espionage, illicit banking and romance in foreign lands.

Dashing from one continent to another, TEGO ARCANA DEI – Keeping God’s Secret sees hero James Pollack’s life unravel at high speed. We follow Pollack through his years as a banker in the City of London to working in the beautiful and seductive Caribbean island of Antigua, before escaping to Switzerland after being hotly pursued by a mysterious agency. In each city he arrives in, James meets alluring women who act as his personal guides, in more ways than one. The story includes a wide range of topics from the frontiers of recent scientific discovery and the development of human consciousness over the millennia. The novel provides an exhilarating ride through the life and times of James Pollack and readers will certainly be left wanting more.

Why did James Pollack put his “Trust in God?”

What were the “Shepherds of Arcadia” and the "Poussin code?"

Who wrote the “Gospel of Mary?"

What were the secrets of the “Bride Chamber?”

Click here to buy online from Amazon or here to read the press release.


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