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The Heaven Saga #1
The Lost Hero
An insomnia driven walk changes the destiny of Brian. Taken by the Greys for what seemed to be a routine abduction instead catapults a lone human into space and uncertainty. Befriended by some and feared by many, he must endure a solitary journey amongst alien races and cultures while struggling to survive. But beyond this the gears of fate are turning. Thousands of years ago a plan was concieved by the one the aliens refer to simply as the Teacher. Was Brian's appearance chance, or fate?
- GenresScience Fiction
338 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 3, 2012
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Marcus Johnson
11 books4 followersThe first thing I'll say is I don't like talking about myself. It feels like I'm feeding my ego, which can be a pervasive monster at times. But enough of that, onto my boring bio. I was born in Duluth Minnesota. I graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth with a B.A. in English. To be honest I don't have any interesting stories to tell of my life, but there are a few things I'll say to describe myself. I love reading, mostly fantasy and sci-fi, but also a lot of classical philosophy. I play and GM a number of table top RPGs, I'm sure you know the names of a few.
If you'd like to contact me directly my email address is macidius@yahoo.com. You can also follow me on Twitter under the name of @sandsofaquarius. I don't say much but I do announce how far along I am on my writing projects.
If you'd like to contact me directly my email address is macidius@yahoo.com. You can also follow me on Twitter under the name of @sandsofaquarius. I don't say much but I do announce how far along I am on my writing projects.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 17, 2019
The Lost Hero (Book One of the Heaven Saga) By Marcus Johnson
I loved this story and I loved the character of Brian Peterson and despite some of the major road bumps I gave the whole work five stars because I felt that overall the author did well enough toward entertaining me and the final portion of the book was a means of acquitting his transgressions.
That much said not everyone will love this story there are a number of reasons the least of which might be the Heaven Saga part. It's almost misleading in away, yet not at all if one were to accept any notion of Heaven as being mythological. This seem to be written largely from the point of view of someone who is an atheist. This means that all religion though treated as interesting is also dismissed as mythological.
Another interesting aspect of the myth of beliefs is the misguided notion that a democracy by way of the US of A is the only way for people to obtain true freedom, not to mention trying to reverse engineer it through having someone unfamiliar with the concept trying to make sense of the declaration of independence in relationship to deconstructing a monarch. I would at the very least want in future episodes to see how poorly this works and perhaps a stand down and at the very least a healthy look at using the British model for people who are familiar with a monarchies. (I'll grant that the notion is going from a fascist like society to anything with more freedom, but in this case these people obviously have a Queen. I'll give the author benefit in that he's proposing the change over time.)
The next thing might be the cultural backstep. By that I mean that this reads more like a rework of the old ideas seen in such greats of Sci-Fi as Flash Gordon. Male hero swept from Earth into incredible worlds with Bird men no less and with some that are like lion men or cat men. And of course the requisite world of all women. I just recently finish a story where the meter moved the other way with a female protagonist who seemed like a female Lothario. Now I see the wide swing back into the male Lothario in his dream world.
I'm not sure which way I would have preferred to see things. Perhaps I should be happy the author didn't try to make too much of the old trope of all female society with major infighting for possession of the one male. On the other hand it sort of dilutes a whole potential area of conflict to have it look like everyone will be mostly okay with him hopping from bed to bed. Instead we get this kind of hot and cold running theme that almost reaches the edge of the bubble and then backs off. A sort of delicate dance.
The story starts out with the alien Greys and alien abduction from Earth which some people might be getting tired of. What is interesting in this story is the back-story to those aliens. There being a number of higher races that first enter space and create a Confederation of world for those who obtain interstellar flight which all sounds familiar. But since the Greys are one of the advance races in this space race they have opted out of the Confederation. (They in fact have some sinister objective and they seem to be the only ones violating the rule to keep Earth isolated.) Apparently Earth is too violent for these people and has been isolated. No one should be approaching Earth to view or research them. This seems to be a convenient plot point for the Greys who don't feel they have to abide by those rules. Brian the abductee is saved by the Kalaidian's and later he saves a few of them to sort of balance out the scales.
It quickly moves on to more of a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon type story. Brian can't be returned home and as it turns out he looks almost to fulfill some prophecies of their myths. Brian is a good looking and likeable guy stuck on a ship of all females because for some reason the males of the Kalaidian's have all died off. This begins a portion that might put some people off because it just looks like a stack of one trope after another. It's not until later where these things are all sorted out and better explained that things begin to make sense and really get interesting.
Brian has access to a strange phenomenon that is referred to as Berserker. Brian kind-of loses it while in battle and kills everything nearby. There is something that happens with the eyes and by the description its something that happens because of Nanos that have been injected into him by the Kalaidians for both health and strength and the ability to understand languages. The problem with this is that, before the injection, while aboard the Grey ship Brian does something similar that results in his killing all the Greys aboard the ship. This could almost look like a plot hole and maybe gets explained in future episodes.
A big caveat in this book is the Grammar spelling punctuation thing. I was less annoyed than some people by the missing words and sometimes extra words and missing parts of words that cause the sentences to be difficult to read. It definitely looks like this book could use more editing. Most annoying to me was the use of lied for lay there are seven instances that it should have been lay and it would be less annoying if there were not the three instances where lay was properly used at the beginning. It's almost as though the first few chapter received some editing that the remainder didn't get.
Now to get back to what I liked. In the back part of the book as the author hits the action packed climatic scenes he does a tremendous job of drawing the reader into the story and for me that made most of the above become excusable. But that's for me and other readers will have to read this novel themselves to decide what they think.
As for the length of the story; it is definitely novel size and one thing that would be more helpful than the page count would be an approximate word count. Page counts and even location numbers within the kindle tend to be deceiving sometimes. I'm certainly happy it wasn't longer because there is a bit of exposition at the end that reveals the political and religious elements quite strongly that I'm grateful didn't get carried too far. So this is a novel that is probably just at the edge of the best size for this type of novel.
This is a good story for fans of SFF with the emphasis on Fantasy and a leniency toward editing problems.
J.L. Dobias
I loved this story and I loved the character of Brian Peterson and despite some of the major road bumps I gave the whole work five stars because I felt that overall the author did well enough toward entertaining me and the final portion of the book was a means of acquitting his transgressions.
That much said not everyone will love this story there are a number of reasons the least of which might be the Heaven Saga part. It's almost misleading in away, yet not at all if one were to accept any notion of Heaven as being mythological. This seem to be written largely from the point of view of someone who is an atheist. This means that all religion though treated as interesting is also dismissed as mythological.
Another interesting aspect of the myth of beliefs is the misguided notion that a democracy by way of the US of A is the only way for people to obtain true freedom, not to mention trying to reverse engineer it through having someone unfamiliar with the concept trying to make sense of the declaration of independence in relationship to deconstructing a monarch. I would at the very least want in future episodes to see how poorly this works and perhaps a stand down and at the very least a healthy look at using the British model for people who are familiar with a monarchies. (I'll grant that the notion is going from a fascist like society to anything with more freedom, but in this case these people obviously have a Queen. I'll give the author benefit in that he's proposing the change over time.)
The next thing might be the cultural backstep. By that I mean that this reads more like a rework of the old ideas seen in such greats of Sci-Fi as Flash Gordon. Male hero swept from Earth into incredible worlds with Bird men no less and with some that are like lion men or cat men. And of course the requisite world of all women. I just recently finish a story where the meter moved the other way with a female protagonist who seemed like a female Lothario. Now I see the wide swing back into the male Lothario in his dream world.
I'm not sure which way I would have preferred to see things. Perhaps I should be happy the author didn't try to make too much of the old trope of all female society with major infighting for possession of the one male. On the other hand it sort of dilutes a whole potential area of conflict to have it look like everyone will be mostly okay with him hopping from bed to bed. Instead we get this kind of hot and cold running theme that almost reaches the edge of the bubble and then backs off. A sort of delicate dance.
The story starts out with the alien Greys and alien abduction from Earth which some people might be getting tired of. What is interesting in this story is the back-story to those aliens. There being a number of higher races that first enter space and create a Confederation of world for those who obtain interstellar flight which all sounds familiar. But since the Greys are one of the advance races in this space race they have opted out of the Confederation. (They in fact have some sinister objective and they seem to be the only ones violating the rule to keep Earth isolated.) Apparently Earth is too violent for these people and has been isolated. No one should be approaching Earth to view or research them. This seems to be a convenient plot point for the Greys who don't feel they have to abide by those rules. Brian the abductee is saved by the Kalaidian's and later he saves a few of them to sort of balance out the scales.
It quickly moves on to more of a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon type story. Brian can't be returned home and as it turns out he looks almost to fulfill some prophecies of their myths. Brian is a good looking and likeable guy stuck on a ship of all females because for some reason the males of the Kalaidian's have all died off. This begins a portion that might put some people off because it just looks like a stack of one trope after another. It's not until later where these things are all sorted out and better explained that things begin to make sense and really get interesting.
Brian has access to a strange phenomenon that is referred to as Berserker. Brian kind-of loses it while in battle and kills everything nearby. There is something that happens with the eyes and by the description its something that happens because of Nanos that have been injected into him by the Kalaidians for both health and strength and the ability to understand languages. The problem with this is that, before the injection, while aboard the Grey ship Brian does something similar that results in his killing all the Greys aboard the ship. This could almost look like a plot hole and maybe gets explained in future episodes.
A big caveat in this book is the Grammar spelling punctuation thing. I was less annoyed than some people by the missing words and sometimes extra words and missing parts of words that cause the sentences to be difficult to read. It definitely looks like this book could use more editing. Most annoying to me was the use of lied for lay there are seven instances that it should have been lay and it would be less annoying if there were not the three instances where lay was properly used at the beginning. It's almost as though the first few chapter received some editing that the remainder didn't get.
Now to get back to what I liked. In the back part of the book as the author hits the action packed climatic scenes he does a tremendous job of drawing the reader into the story and for me that made most of the above become excusable. But that's for me and other readers will have to read this novel themselves to decide what they think.
As for the length of the story; it is definitely novel size and one thing that would be more helpful than the page count would be an approximate word count. Page counts and even location numbers within the kindle tend to be deceiving sometimes. I'm certainly happy it wasn't longer because there is a bit of exposition at the end that reveals the political and religious elements quite strongly that I'm grateful didn't get carried too far. So this is a novel that is probably just at the edge of the best size for this type of novel.
This is a good story for fans of SFF with the emphasis on Fantasy and a leniency toward editing problems.
J.L. Dobias
November 20, 2019
I like the main character! I am a big sucker for the human from Earth goes into the big, bad universe and changes things story line
I really hated the bad guys and really liked the good guys. Seeing the main character's interaction with the crew of the ship that rescues him, is quite enjoyable. The job description of the post he ends up serving in is interesting. His adventures, and the perception of those around him bring many questions to mind.
This is a winner!
I really hated the bad guys and really liked the good guys. Seeing the main character's interaction with the crew of the ship that rescues him, is quite enjoyable. The job description of the post he ends up serving in is interesting. His adventures, and the perception of those around him bring many questions to mind.
This is a winner!
January 12, 2017
Wow! I'm so glad I found this author. This book was amazing. I have not experienced the Golden Age of sci-fi adventure novels, but I know what style it was by having read some of the classic (pulp) masters of the era. I don't know about M. Johnson personal experience, but let me tell you that his book took me back to the Golden Age of science fiction. Here is a list of what you will find in the book: a (human) young man finds himself stranded on a planet where the men are extinct, leaving only beautiful women with brightly colorful hair and eyes (but otherwise seductive human features). A world where freedom is non-existent, but where a religious prophesy talk about the coming of a human saviour. A confederation of planets regrouping several diverse alien races with different agendas and goals for the future, etc. But the greatest thing that you will find in the book is the omnipresent sense of wonder, adventure, fun and pure Sci-FY goodness. While I was reading the book, I had memories of my youth when I was glued to my TV watching shows like Goldorak, Albator, Capitaine Flamme etc. (I'm french, so Google them). The author's writing style is very simple, easy-to-read and effective. You won't find any science/techno bla-bla, only pure action storytelling. Some of the (very too few) reviews of this book mention the bad editing, missing small words like ''to'' or ''the'' and unfortunately they are right. I did find several of this omission, but nothing that hurt the overall experience. I think I have found the author that will finally take me on the pure, fun, Golden Age, pulp science-fiction ride I've been waiting for. Thank you M. Marcus Johnson.
November 4, 2016
Imagine being 20-something years old, you are kidnapped by scary aliens, then 'rescued' by very attractive Kalaidian females. It then turns out you are a legendary warrior and prophesied savior to these Kalaidians, and there are no Kalaidian males! What's more, most of these women you meet want to (and do) have sex with you. If that's not enough, you almost single-handedly defeat all the aliens that the Kalaidians have been fighting for so long, and then you promptly prevent a bloody revolution and convince the Kalaidian queen, with the power of your smile and charm, to step down and give democracy a go.
This is a very amateuristic and childish attempt at story-telling in general and sci-fi in particular.
I don't know Marcus Johnson, I just hope, for his sake, that he is a teenager with very limited real-world experience, because that would be the only reasonable explanation for writing this story.
This is a very amateuristic and childish attempt at story-telling in general and sci-fi in particular.
I don't know Marcus Johnson, I just hope, for his sake, that he is a teenager with very limited real-world experience, because that would be the only reasonable explanation for writing this story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 1, 2012
This book made me remember why I like space operas. This one has a fast pace and an engaging story, so much so that I went on to read the entire trilogy, and hope more books are coming.
One word of caution though, it has a lot of spelling and gramatical errors, such as saying from when it should be for, and that makes it a little clunky to read.
One word of caution though, it has a lot of spelling and gramatical errors, such as saying from when it should be for, and that makes it a little clunky to read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews