Review of Ben Brown’s Flying Machine by Michael Thorp
Michael Thorp was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. He has lived in Australia, China, England, India, South Korea, and Cambodia, traveled through over forty-five countries, made two award winning low-budget *feature films, a pilot comedy news satire show, and a few music videos. Ben Brown’s Flying Machine is his first novel.
Ben Brown’s Flying Machine is a hugely imaginative read, complete with a boy genius who invents a fantastical flying machine in his barn, giant space aliens, and enough twists and turns to satisfy any science fiction aficionado.
The story begins as Ben, the achingly vulnerable protagonist, loses his father at a young age. He has inherited his father’s penchant for invention, however, and it stands him in good stead when a NASA spacecraft, back from a mission to deep space, crashes in his wheatfield and disgorges an unlikely aged alien, who touches Ben and transmits the sum total of his alien knowledge — which is far-advanced compared to anything on Earth — to Ben in the blink of an eye.
Ben’s newfound knowledge comes along just in time to save the heavily mortgaged farmstead, and Ben quickly becomes an international celebrity by building his incredible flying platform. The apparatus runs on a revolutionary drive system unheard of by Terran scientists and researchers, and Ben quickly makes plans to utilize his flying contraption to explore the vast reaches of uncharted space.
There’s a love interest, of course, but the charming Maryann does not figure too heavily in the action — just enough to keep it interesting.
Ben flies up into the stratosphere and well beyond, into a strange new galaxy peopled with giants, the Nephalim, supposedly descended from angels. They rule their empire with an iron fist and Ben is hard pressed to stay alive.
Here, to be honest, the plotline gets a little thin and the reader is required to proceed with a minimum of backstory. Somehow, a plot to invade Earth is getting underway just as Ben arrives and he must figure out a way to stop it, free some wretched slaves and still make it back to Earth unscathed.
It’s a bit of a stretch, credibility-wise, but somehow, the author brings it off with the aplomb of an old-fashioned science fiction movie director from the Fifties. If you can suspend your disbelief and just go along for the wild ride, it’s an enjoyable read.
One other item of note. The author is not from the United States, where the first half of the book is set. The reader — if he’s an American, like me — keeps stumbling over words that just aren’t used in the U.S., like kerb and cheeky and spanner. Not a big deal, but it got a bit awkward for me.
I give Ben Brown’s Flying Machine four stars, mostly on the basis of sheer imagination.
