Review of 2147: Book One Revelations by SDZ Whitaker
Author SDZ Whitaker says he is a chubby, pink Shrek lookalike who just recently published his first book. It took about 2 years to write and he says he is really quite proud to have finished it. He has had a variety of jobs ranging from the interesting to mind numbingly boring, including being a croupier and working at the BBC for a number of years. He has loved Sci-Fi since he could understand the concept and is a proud Trekker.
It’s the 22nd Century and earth looks very different. The USA no longer is a dominant world power and it has been replaced with a much broader geographic region and coalition: the United Continent of America (UCA).
Other, stronger coalitions have emerged and formed a federation called the G6 to oversee developments on Earth. Things are going along swimmingly until a much smaller coalition of nations, the Independent Nation Collective (INC), invents the Light Speed Drive (LSD) and threatens to upset the balance of power.
Meanwhile, aliens, who really did visit Roswell in 1947, are also threatening to muck things up if the earthlings achieve light speed capability with installation of the LSD in an interstellar space vehicle.
Are you confused yet? To be honest, the plotline gets a bit convoluted as national entities bicker back and forth ad nauseam over how this space drive will play out and change things up — not necessarily for the better.
First-time author SDZ Whitaker has taken a fairly good concept and expanded it to 294 pages of sometimes stilted dialogue that threatens enjoyment of the story in many places. A middle-level bureaucrat is tasked with the job of stopping development of the LSD, but gets caught, yet beats the rap somehow that’s never fully explained.
The aliens in the story, two representatives of a fairly benign race of reptilian beings called the Azranaal, watch all this jockeying for power with bemusement, and discuss their boredom at being stuck at the out-of-the-way space station near the edge of our solar system — like two Soviet soldiers in the long-ago Cold War stationed in a godforsaken part of Siberia. It’s quite funny, really, as we see the human race through their eyes.
Still, things heat up a bit as the soldiers’ C.O., the Supreme Chancellor Theera, comes to visit, intent on an eventual invasion of Earth. He thinks it will not be too difficult, “as these Neanderthals were only ever minutes away from erupting into a new war.”
But wait. There’s an unexpected twist: the aliens really want Earth’s overpopulated humans to utilize the LSD to populate the outer rim of the universe, thus easing overpopulation on Earth, and so they offer their help. Will this be their tactic for peacefully taking over the planet? Will the politicians who ultimately welcome the offer survive the seemingly gracious offer?
The reader must hang on for another third of the book before finding out.
2147: Revelations has many good things going for it: a good plotline that challenges the imagination; well-written characters that are vulnerable and likeable — both alien and human. But the book suffers from a chronic lack of commas and good proofreading, and then there is the tendency for the dialogue to sound like a C-Span transcript.
I’m giving this book four stars based on sheer effort on the part of a new author to deliver a story that must have been clear in his mind; it just got a little overdeveloped and wound up becoming a tome instead of a fast-paced read.
Better execution of the basics of good fiction should make his next book better. I, for one, look forward to it.
