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Windows of Heaven #2
The Paladin's Odyssey
Humanity has amnesia, a symptom of physical and psychological trauma. Scars on planet Earth give disturbing testimony of vast upheaval. The Windows of Heaven is the 5-novel epic of a distant blacked-out past. Yet some horrors won’t stay buried… The Paladin's Odyssey continues the saga of the Seer Clan’s decline in a dying world that once surfaced Earth ages before our own. For U’Sumi, son of A'Nu-Ahki, being the butt of ethnic and religious prejudice is normal. Yet the Seer Clan’s rejection of his father as the prophesied Comforter is the least of his problems. In distant Aztlan, the young priestess, Pyra wonders if her horrific nightmares are mere dreams. Aztlan’s titans bask in hi-tech indolence over an empire enslaved by hypno-engineered superstition aided by the techno-sorceress Pandura, Pyra’s grandmother. Then Pyra discovers terrible secrets under the temple laboratories… U'Sumi faces death on a vast scale when the Seer Clan combats Aztlan’s invasion. All his life, his father warned him of the coming World-end. Now horrors of bio-mechanized warfare and gnawing doubts bring harrowing changes to U’Sumi’s life when he is trapped inside the abomination of the enemy’s most fearsome weapon. Here he discovers the hideous nature of Aztlan's power—a force already running amok and unraveling the very fabric of life on Earth...
396 pages, Paperback
First published September 25, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 18, 2012
Before I get into this review I want to remind my readers that The Windows of Heaven is a 5-novel epic retelling of the Biblical account of Noah and the Flood. The epic’s premise is that much of the Sumero-Akkadian mythology and language is revisionist history by a polytheistic people. Author K. G. Powderly Jr. seeks to creatively rediscover a possible pre-Flood world by unraveling the corruptions committed by later post-Flood peoples.
Book 1: Dawn Apocalypse Rising was an awesome book, full of intrigue and adventure, dinosaurs and lost technology. It ended with a vision that God would send a cataclysmic judgment in 125 years. Seventy years have passed since that time and the world has grown steadily worse. The Paladin's Odyssey follows the adventures and intrigues of two people fated to be together: U'Sumi, son of A'Nu-Ahki [the latter being the Biblical Noah], a young man fighting his own calling even as he prepares to fend off an invasion from distant Aztlan; and Pyra T'Qinna, a young priestess of Aztlan, who discovers horrible secrets in the laboratories beneath her temple.
While there is a good bit of action and intrigue, this book is essentially about finding faith and having that faith challenged in the face of immense suffering and sin. The characters in this book face everything from the horrors of war, to family betrayal, from the machinations of sinful men to the genetic abominations created by fallen angels by manipulating the creation codes of men. Because it deals so frankly with sin, including sexual sins and child sacrifice, this book is not recommended for younger readers. On the other hand, Powderly does a masterful job of illustrating the scope of suffering men are capable of inflicting upon themselves and others in a world that rejects its Creator's will. He also discusses why God would create men if He knew they would sin and why God was justified in sending a worldwide Flood to judge the world. It was absolutely breath-taking and, while Powderly admits his vision of the pre-Flood world might be fanciful, one cannot come away from his book without thinking things must have been very much like the world he describes!
Powderly also attempts to account for the origins of false religious deities and mythological figures like Pandora, Poseidon, Calliope, Mnemosyne, Atlas and others. In the world he imagines, these corruptions of the truth are based on real individuals who were later deified and re-interpreted by later generations. No other pre-Flood adventure has so thoroughly attempted to account for such things and it made for a fun read – especially if you know your mythology!
The book ends with an all-out assault on the Biblical Garden of Eden that was absolutely captivating. I highly recommend The Paladin's Odyssey!
You can buy this book on Amazon or find out more about the series at BrokenParadise.com.
-Rev Tony Breeden
From the Bookwyrm's Lair
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author for review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Book 1: Dawn Apocalypse Rising was an awesome book, full of intrigue and adventure, dinosaurs and lost technology. It ended with a vision that God would send a cataclysmic judgment in 125 years. Seventy years have passed since that time and the world has grown steadily worse. The Paladin's Odyssey follows the adventures and intrigues of two people fated to be together: U'Sumi, son of A'Nu-Ahki [the latter being the Biblical Noah], a young man fighting his own calling even as he prepares to fend off an invasion from distant Aztlan; and Pyra T'Qinna, a young priestess of Aztlan, who discovers horrible secrets in the laboratories beneath her temple.
While there is a good bit of action and intrigue, this book is essentially about finding faith and having that faith challenged in the face of immense suffering and sin. The characters in this book face everything from the horrors of war, to family betrayal, from the machinations of sinful men to the genetic abominations created by fallen angels by manipulating the creation codes of men. Because it deals so frankly with sin, including sexual sins and child sacrifice, this book is not recommended for younger readers. On the other hand, Powderly does a masterful job of illustrating the scope of suffering men are capable of inflicting upon themselves and others in a world that rejects its Creator's will. He also discusses why God would create men if He knew they would sin and why God was justified in sending a worldwide Flood to judge the world. It was absolutely breath-taking and, while Powderly admits his vision of the pre-Flood world might be fanciful, one cannot come away from his book without thinking things must have been very much like the world he describes!
Powderly also attempts to account for the origins of false religious deities and mythological figures like Pandora, Poseidon, Calliope, Mnemosyne, Atlas and others. In the world he imagines, these corruptions of the truth are based on real individuals who were later deified and re-interpreted by later generations. No other pre-Flood adventure has so thoroughly attempted to account for such things and it made for a fun read – especially if you know your mythology!
The book ends with an all-out assault on the Biblical Garden of Eden that was absolutely captivating. I highly recommend The Paladin's Odyssey!
You can buy this book on Amazon or find out more about the series at BrokenParadise.com.
-Rev Tony Breeden
From the Bookwyrm's Lair
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author for review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
July 16, 2014
The second book satisfies in the same way the first did. This is the not, safe bible stories of our childhood but a gripping, speculative look into our past.
Powderly continues to stretch the mind with the adventure, grittiness, and insanity that lays in the human heart. One thing I appreciated in this volume of the Windows of Heaven series that he answers tough questions. In this book, the people are aware of the term World End (our word -- apocalypse)and speculate on what it means.
Does the World End signify an actual event or an allegorical one? Is the event truly a bad one or the horizon of a new world? Every conceivable opinion of World End is touched in the book -- much in the same I think we speculate today. However, since there is nothing new under the sun, the awareness that things cannot continue as they are pervades our collective consciousness whether we wish to explore it or not.
In the story, the transhumanism movement is visited in the pre-Flood world just as it is today. Dial up humans to make them better. Stating humans are only materials to manipulate. With this kind of thinking, we have reduced ourselves to nothing more than commodities with no innate intrinsic value. Think of designer babies and the clandestine experiments that cause us to explore bio-ethics.
As far as the characters, they continue to be real. Nu's character has developed into his more familiar role we like to see him in. U'semi (the Shem character) is the son of this man caught up in the futile anarchistic defiance of world falling into a deeper madness. Pyra, his wife, is a woman of her time -- sacrificed on the altar of pleasure and feminism, much like today but is plucked from her life by a man obeying God. I like the interplay of these two as U'semi respected and cherished even when she didn't feel as she deserved it.
Lastly, the state of the fallen angels once again titillate my mind. The angels are perceived as gods to the people who worship them, taken with an lust for them not natural. Again, I'm vastly intrigued by this aspect as it is one of the major factors in the reason for World-end. Even more brightly throughout the love that God has for us that we truly cannot fully comprehend. That struck me the most. God's love in the midst of all this insanity, even as it is today.
All in all, a thrilling book.
Powderly continues to stretch the mind with the adventure, grittiness, and insanity that lays in the human heart. One thing I appreciated in this volume of the Windows of Heaven series that he answers tough questions. In this book, the people are aware of the term World End (our word -- apocalypse)and speculate on what it means.
Does the World End signify an actual event or an allegorical one? Is the event truly a bad one or the horizon of a new world? Every conceivable opinion of World End is touched in the book -- much in the same I think we speculate today. However, since there is nothing new under the sun, the awareness that things cannot continue as they are pervades our collective consciousness whether we wish to explore it or not.
In the story, the transhumanism movement is visited in the pre-Flood world just as it is today. Dial up humans to make them better. Stating humans are only materials to manipulate. With this kind of thinking, we have reduced ourselves to nothing more than commodities with no innate intrinsic value. Think of designer babies and the clandestine experiments that cause us to explore bio-ethics.
As far as the characters, they continue to be real. Nu's character has developed into his more familiar role we like to see him in. U'semi (the Shem character) is the son of this man caught up in the futile anarchistic defiance of world falling into a deeper madness. Pyra, his wife, is a woman of her time -- sacrificed on the altar of pleasure and feminism, much like today but is plucked from her life by a man obeying God. I like the interplay of these two as U'semi respected and cherished even when she didn't feel as she deserved it.
Lastly, the state of the fallen angels once again titillate my mind. The angels are perceived as gods to the people who worship them, taken with an lust for them not natural. Again, I'm vastly intrigued by this aspect as it is one of the major factors in the reason for World-end. Even more brightly throughout the love that God has for us that we truly cannot fully comprehend. That struck me the most. God's love in the midst of all this insanity, even as it is today.
All in all, a thrilling book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews