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Consensus Universe #1
Eclipsing the Aurora: A Science Fiction Adventure
When Nigel gets chucked off a dam, he thinks his time is up. Vivian – an alien from an ancient race that uses Earth’s deep oceans as a retirement home – rescues him and convinces him to join the Consensus. Now all he has to do is give up his life on Earth. But he can’t abandon his birth planet when he learns that the Menace plans to attack. To stop the apocalypse, he must find his high school crush, rescue the daughter he never knew he had, and make the case to the Consensus that humanity is worth saving. It would be a lot easier if he didn’t have amnesia. If you like found family, unlikely heroes, and unique alien technology, you’ll love Eclipsing the Aurora, the latest sci-fi adventure from author Peter J. Foote. Content Historic drug use and sexual assault of an adult are mentioned and/or implied within this story. Child endangerment (kidnapping) is featured.
385 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 2022
50 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
Peter J. Foote
50 books86 followersPeter got locked in a bookstore as a child and has been reading his way to freedom ever since.
His first tales developed from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that never got played, and watching Babylon 5 on repeat. After having several dozen short stories published through various publishers, Peter has switched to longer forms of writing.
The science fiction “Consensus” novels depict one family’s struggle in the face of alien invasion, and the “Vol’kris Chronicles” are a series of standalone tales that explore humanity’s misadventures in a world ruled by insects.
Where to find Peter:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/peterjfooteauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterJFoote1
Newsletter: https://www.subscribepage.com/c3j4h4
His first tales developed from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that never got played, and watching Babylon 5 on repeat. After having several dozen short stories published through various publishers, Peter has switched to longer forms of writing.
The science fiction “Consensus” novels depict one family’s struggle in the face of alien invasion, and the “Vol’kris Chronicles” are a series of standalone tales that explore humanity’s misadventures in a world ruled by insects.
Where to find Peter:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/peterjfooteauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterJFoote1
Newsletter: https://www.subscribepage.com/c3j4h4
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 28, 2022
I cannot praise this book enough. Peter builds just beautiful worlds and relatable characters. I can't wait for the sequel.
November 13, 2022
I've never been a fan of science fiction until I discovered this author. Eclipsing Aurora was such a fascinating plot that I skipped work to read it! The world that the author described was vivid and imaginative and the characters were well developed whether you loved them or hated them. I loved how the author seamlessly blended the real world with the fantasy world he created. This was a super fun and and creative read and a nice escape from a stressful work week. Can't wait for the next book!
January 16, 2023
A truly different alien invasion
Or alien attack, anyway. Interesting subplots twist and turn within the overarching story. Well-written and enjoyable, I'm looking forward to the sequel.
Or alien attack, anyway. Interesting subplots twist and turn within the overarching story. Well-written and enjoyable, I'm looking forward to the sequel.
January 22, 2024
Alright, what’s this one about? A Consensus Universe novel, hmm. So, right, okay. The Consensus is a sort of a union of different alien races, like the Federation or the Culture. But we don’t get there right away.
We start with an admirably flowery description of a sun burning, which transitions to some scaly alien types on a ship collecting the solar radiation for their “Exalted Creator”, who is a big old ball of tentacles that shatters you mentally and physically just by communicating with you. The scaly alien types are the Ghav’eol, and while they are kind of the Big Bad of the story (their Flying Spaghetti Monsteresque Exalted Creator notwithstanding), it’s not really the point of the book.
So, here’s where it gets a little bit tricky.
The Ghav’eol and the Exalted Creator are making a super-weapon to blast Earth. Not because of humans, who are basically a non-warp-capable non-member species of the Federation, but because the Nabui are using Earth’s oceans as a kind of retirement home. The Nabui are big old semi-immortal jellyfish things, like the good counterpart of the Exalted Creator thing. The active Nabui out in Consensus space find out about this, and so they send an agent to warn the elderly Nabui about it.
Still with me? We’re just getting started.
They send Nigel, a human Consensus agent. Wait, what? There’s humans out in space? Yes, in fact – there are nth-generation humans out there in the Consensus. But Nigel isn’t one of them, he’s just a regular Dent, although the comparison maybe isn’t that apt. He’s been out among the Consensus for some time, and he’s sort of acclimated, so he’s really more of a Trillian than an Arthur Dent, but his doleful passivity sort of fits. This is our protagonist – but there’s more.
Nigel is kind of a protagonistic triple-threat, sharing a body with Vivian (a young Nabui who basically exists inside him in some gelatinous way) and a “butler suit”, a kind of semi-sentient leech thing that he wears like clothes and which enhances his strength, eats his poops, and probably does other things but those are the best two things. When Nigel is pinged to take care of the Earth situation, he’s not super jazzed about it but Vivian insists he should, because he has unfinished business back there. Indeed, she thinks it’s so important – like, more-important-than-stopping-the-Ghav’eol-from-destroying-Nabui-space-Florida important – that she locks off most of his memories from the time of their meeting to the present. So Nigel arrives back on Earth with his butler suit and no real idea what’s happening, thinking it has just been a few hours since he left Earth. When it has in fact been seven years.
We’re almost there, just a little more.
Turns out, Nigel “left” Earth under pretty wild circumstances. He’d just bumped into Sandra, a high-school crush turned tradwife turned one night stand turned biker chick, and found she had a child who was almost certainly his. In confronting her, he annoyed her biker boyfriend (and others further up the food chain in time), and wound up getting himself thrown off a dam. At this point he was rescued by Vivian, and his life as Arthur Dent began. Now, not remembering anything after the dam, he returns to Earth with his creepy awesome leech suit and a message for the Nabui which he doesn’t really know about, and so then when Sandra picks him up he – and the reader – begin the adventure in earnest.
Bit by bit, the missing pieces are filled in and the strange, terrible life that Sandra and her child have lived after Nigel’s “murder” by the biker gang comes to light. As do the events leading up to Nigel’s departure from Earth, and everything that’s happened since. And somewhere in among the dangerous quest to make things right with his old Earth existence, Nigel also has to – you know – deliver his message to the Nabui so they can stop the aliens from destroying the planet. But it really isn’t the point here.
Sex-o-meter
One relatively sweet one night stand and a whole lot of gang rape and power rape from the criminal mob and their disgusting boss. Not for the faint-hearted, even if it is not explicitly or graphically depicted, it’s there. The book comes with a content warning, which I initially neglected to mention, and it is important to keep in mind. Not because it is persistently loaded with upsetting themes and imagery, but - well, it's there, and it has the potential to be pretty confronting. It's a huge part of the characters' stories, even if it is not a huge part of the narrative text. A Leaving Las Vegas out of a possible Leaving Las Vegas 2: Face/Off Into Las Vegas for Eclipsing the Aurora.
Gore-o-meter
Bashing and stabbing, shooting and gang / mob murder, and a whole heap of physical and psychological and pharmaceutical torture, this is a pretty brutal one even if – again – it’s not super explicit or graphic (except in some cases). Four flesh-gobbets out of a possible five.
WTF-o-meter
Right from the start, the Exalted Creator was a wild and powerful and very cool creation. The alien story, indeed the whole backstory and plot, is woven in and mysterious and fun to read. Perhaps the WTFfiest part of the story, though, is the fact that Sandra keeps saying Nigel’s butler suit and general demeanour is like something out of The X-Files, and Nigel is just kind of “yeah I know” – but he left Earth in 1991, two years before The X Files was even made. Seemed like a missed opportunity to play the culture-shock card to me. A Beach Boys out of a possible Twisted Sister on the WTF-o-meter for this one, and if anyone correctly contextualises that reference, congratulations – you’re probably old enough that you should be booking regular colonoscopies for yourself.
My Final Verdict
This is the kind of unapologetically creative and out-there sci-fi I like. It threads the needle with the main alien plot being essentially an afterthought, and it does it well. There’s very cool ideas and setup, let down a bit by some rough edges in the writing. At first I thought it was kind of dumb that Vivian was entrusting this world-saving mission to a guy she just force-reset to factory settings in the worst possible point in his life, but as the story continued I realised (or at least such was my interpretation) that Nigel’s life and story and closure were as important, to Vivian, as the entire world and the ancient Nabui who lived there (also a bunch of humans), and there was something beautiful and alien and thought-provoking about that. Four stars! Good stuff!
We start with an admirably flowery description of a sun burning, which transitions to some scaly alien types on a ship collecting the solar radiation for their “Exalted Creator”, who is a big old ball of tentacles that shatters you mentally and physically just by communicating with you. The scaly alien types are the Ghav’eol, and while they are kind of the Big Bad of the story (their Flying Spaghetti Monsteresque Exalted Creator notwithstanding), it’s not really the point of the book.
So, here’s where it gets a little bit tricky.
The Ghav’eol and the Exalted Creator are making a super-weapon to blast Earth. Not because of humans, who are basically a non-warp-capable non-member species of the Federation, but because the Nabui are using Earth’s oceans as a kind of retirement home. The Nabui are big old semi-immortal jellyfish things, like the good counterpart of the Exalted Creator thing. The active Nabui out in Consensus space find out about this, and so they send an agent to warn the elderly Nabui about it.
Still with me? We’re just getting started.
They send Nigel, a human Consensus agent. Wait, what? There’s humans out in space? Yes, in fact – there are nth-generation humans out there in the Consensus. But Nigel isn’t one of them, he’s just a regular Dent, although the comparison maybe isn’t that apt. He’s been out among the Consensus for some time, and he’s sort of acclimated, so he’s really more of a Trillian than an Arthur Dent, but his doleful passivity sort of fits. This is our protagonist – but there’s more.
Nigel is kind of a protagonistic triple-threat, sharing a body with Vivian (a young Nabui who basically exists inside him in some gelatinous way) and a “butler suit”, a kind of semi-sentient leech thing that he wears like clothes and which enhances his strength, eats his poops, and probably does other things but those are the best two things. When Nigel is pinged to take care of the Earth situation, he’s not super jazzed about it but Vivian insists he should, because he has unfinished business back there. Indeed, she thinks it’s so important – like, more-important-than-stopping-the-Ghav’eol-from-destroying-Nabui-space-Florida important – that she locks off most of his memories from the time of their meeting to the present. So Nigel arrives back on Earth with his butler suit and no real idea what’s happening, thinking it has just been a few hours since he left Earth. When it has in fact been seven years.
We’re almost there, just a little more.
Turns out, Nigel “left” Earth under pretty wild circumstances. He’d just bumped into Sandra, a high-school crush turned tradwife turned one night stand turned biker chick, and found she had a child who was almost certainly his. In confronting her, he annoyed her biker boyfriend (and others further up the food chain in time), and wound up getting himself thrown off a dam. At this point he was rescued by Vivian, and his life as Arthur Dent began. Now, not remembering anything after the dam, he returns to Earth with his creepy awesome leech suit and a message for the Nabui which he doesn’t really know about, and so then when Sandra picks him up he – and the reader – begin the adventure in earnest.
Bit by bit, the missing pieces are filled in and the strange, terrible life that Sandra and her child have lived after Nigel’s “murder” by the biker gang comes to light. As do the events leading up to Nigel’s departure from Earth, and everything that’s happened since. And somewhere in among the dangerous quest to make things right with his old Earth existence, Nigel also has to – you know – deliver his message to the Nabui so they can stop the aliens from destroying the planet. But it really isn’t the point here.
Sex-o-meter
One relatively sweet one night stand and a whole lot of gang rape and power rape from the criminal mob and their disgusting boss. Not for the faint-hearted, even if it is not explicitly or graphically depicted, it’s there. The book comes with a content warning, which I initially neglected to mention, and it is important to keep in mind. Not because it is persistently loaded with upsetting themes and imagery, but - well, it's there, and it has the potential to be pretty confronting. It's a huge part of the characters' stories, even if it is not a huge part of the narrative text. A Leaving Las Vegas out of a possible Leaving Las Vegas 2: Face/Off Into Las Vegas for Eclipsing the Aurora.
Gore-o-meter
Bashing and stabbing, shooting and gang / mob murder, and a whole heap of physical and psychological and pharmaceutical torture, this is a pretty brutal one even if – again – it’s not super explicit or graphic (except in some cases). Four flesh-gobbets out of a possible five.
WTF-o-meter
Right from the start, the Exalted Creator was a wild and powerful and very cool creation. The alien story, indeed the whole backstory and plot, is woven in and mysterious and fun to read. Perhaps the WTFfiest part of the story, though, is the fact that Sandra keeps saying Nigel’s butler suit and general demeanour is like something out of The X-Files, and Nigel is just kind of “yeah I know” – but he left Earth in 1991, two years before The X Files was even made. Seemed like a missed opportunity to play the culture-shock card to me. A Beach Boys out of a possible Twisted Sister on the WTF-o-meter for this one, and if anyone correctly contextualises that reference, congratulations – you’re probably old enough that you should be booking regular colonoscopies for yourself.
My Final Verdict
This is the kind of unapologetically creative and out-there sci-fi I like. It threads the needle with the main alien plot being essentially an afterthought, and it does it well. There’s very cool ideas and setup, let down a bit by some rough edges in the writing. At first I thought it was kind of dumb that Vivian was entrusting this world-saving mission to a guy she just force-reset to factory settings in the worst possible point in his life, but as the story continued I realised (or at least such was my interpretation) that Nigel’s life and story and closure were as important, to Vivian, as the entire world and the ancient Nabui who lived there (also a bunch of humans), and there was something beautiful and alien and thought-provoking about that. Four stars! Good stuff!
December 4, 2024
This was a bit of an odd duck in sci-fi from my point of view. By that I mean how first contact is handled. But I enjoyed it.
I really loved the concept of the Old Mothers. It speaks of the love that mothers have for those they call their children, birthed or chosen.
I didn't like the Exalted Creator or how they manipulated their subjects the Ghav'eol. Perhaps if we had more backstory on the Exalted Creator their purpose would have been clearer. Subjection is wrong but I do understand that we need a villain in each story.
I liked the fact that we did get some back story on Nigel, Vivian, Sandra, and Marion. It helped to connect some of the dots. However, there are bits of the happenings that don't have connections so the reader is left to fill in their own blanks. I know that we can't always have all the answers with sci-fi.
There was no real cliffhanger ending just the promise of more possible answers. And so I have started the next book.
My feeling is that the purpose of sci-fi is to open our minds to whatever possibilities could come. This one took a different approach on first contact. Be open and enjoy reading what the author thinks could be.
I really loved the concept of the Old Mothers. It speaks of the love that mothers have for those they call their children, birthed or chosen.
I didn't like the Exalted Creator or how they manipulated their subjects the Ghav'eol. Perhaps if we had more backstory on the Exalted Creator their purpose would have been clearer. Subjection is wrong but I do understand that we need a villain in each story.
I liked the fact that we did get some back story on Nigel, Vivian, Sandra, and Marion. It helped to connect some of the dots. However, there are bits of the happenings that don't have connections so the reader is left to fill in their own blanks. I know that we can't always have all the answers with sci-fi.
There was no real cliffhanger ending just the promise of more possible answers. And so I have started the next book.
My feeling is that the purpose of sci-fi is to open our minds to whatever possibilities could come. This one took a different approach on first contact. Be open and enjoy reading what the author thinks could be.
December 6, 2024
I always feel like I can never do a review justice, so bear with me. This is an amazing blend of sci-fi and, well, not, because there's certain elements of traditional sci-fi elements, but they are blended into and mesh SO WELL with our world that the swap between then were seamless in the best way possible.
Between the characters that leapt off the page, even the villains, to the subtle world building that kept me wanting more, page after page, and yet neither the "every day" stuff or the sci-fi parts detracted from one another. I don't know how to explain it better other than it's a great symbiosis of writing what felt like two different genres and making something wholly new.
I'm going to need more Consensus stories.
Between the characters that leapt off the page, even the villains, to the subtle world building that kept me wanting more, page after page, and yet neither the "every day" stuff or the sci-fi parts detracted from one another. I don't know how to explain it better other than it's a great symbiosis of writing what felt like two different genres and making something wholly new.
I'm going to need more Consensus stories.
August 27, 2024
Eclipsing the Aurora has some of the most imaginative world-building of any book I’ve read in a long while. Foote had a surprisingly fresh take on both his aliens and their technology. While the story mostly focuses on Nigel and his quest to deal with his past, there are hints of a much larger, galactic-level plot that I’m sure will be expanded on in future books. The story itself moved along at a quick pace with enough twists and action to be thoroughly entertaining, even for an action-junkie like me. One thing is for sure—I may never look at jellyfish the same way again!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews