March to Other Worlds Day 21: Oblivion Threshold by J.R. Mabry and B.J. West

Day 21: Oblivion Threshold by J. R. Mabry and B. J. West

In Oblivion Threshold, J. R. Mabry and B. J. West put a twist on the classic space war for the survival of humanity. Actually, they put two twists on it and both are really good. First, the alien Prox are just weird. They ride on the outside of their spaceships and scavenge solar systems for all of their collectable metals. There are a lot of creepy images associated with this trait, but the best is the sound of alien creatures landing on human spaceships and starting to carve them open so they can harvest their metals. Humans aren’t food here—they’re just in the way.

 

The second twist is the accidental solution that might let humanity survive these creatures. Captain Jeff Bowers is killed while spying on the Prox but a second group of aliens—a sort of group intelligence who have transcended above physical bodies—intervene and reconstruct him. In doing so, they accidentally show him how to translocate objects across lightyears of space instantaneously. If Bowers can master this power, humanity will be able to bolster its defense against the Prox by fully utilizing all of its military assets while jumping them around space to keep them out of harms way. Problem—the second set of aliens don’t want Jeff using his powers this way. They seem to think that there’s a decent chance he’ll accidentally destroy the universe.

 

So Oblivion Threshold develops two very different, but totally intertwined, storylines involving two different alien species—and it is fascinating watching the cast try and sort through their problems. I do have a couple of nitpicky complaints, but I want to stress that these didn’t harm my overall enjoyment of the novel. First, and most importantly, the obvious solution to the second alien race’s fear is for them to help humanity defeat the Prox by doing the translocation for them. They might have said no, but they needed to be asked. Second, I found it unlikely that the one military commander whose ship successfully fought and escaped the Prox would have later been risked in an experiment that any captain could have handled. It seems to me that her expertise would have been tapped to prep humanity for its next encounter with the hostile aliens.

 

Those complaints aside, this is a really fun book that people who love a bit of military space opera are likely to enjoy.

 

Oblivion Threshold authors Mabry and West have made the novel free on Amazon from March 20-24. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

 

 

The second book in the Oblivion series is selling at 99 cents on Amazon until March 30. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

 

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