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Books

Origin by J.T. Brannan (book review).

There are some books you start reading by accident in the hope that there might be something good in them. Unfortunately, JT. Brannan’s first book ‘Origin’ isn’t one of them. Yes, it works as an adventure but when you start adding up the pseudo-science clichés, I was mostly counting them and expecting the next to turn up. In that respect, I wasn’t disappointed. As such as little green apples, they were all there, including the finale. Everything from van Daniken to Roswell to Atlantis and Area 51. It was almost as though Brannan was flicking a book on the subject as he wrote. To make it worse, the two lead characters had so much luck on their side, picking their right friends, getting the right equipment and money when they needed it that the plot simply a story by numbers. The more villainous aspect, let alone those who were picked to survive came practically out of ‘The X-Files’ main thread.

Origin

A 40,000 year old corpse is found in the Antarctic, looking particularly modern but isn’t. The military team sent in to collect it destroys the helicopter carrying back the science team who discovered it. Fortunately, Doctor Evelyn ‘Lynn’ Edwards manages to get out just in time and picked up by a trawler. We’ll forget how could she survive in a cold ocean for more than a minute or so in the same way anyone could determine she was pregnant after eight days later in the story. Getting ashore, she contacts her ex-husband, Matt Adams, a Native American and now a former scout for a black ops team, who willingly comes to her aid. From then on, they are fleeing from the bad guys who have a lot of clout and trying to find out what is going on.

I thought books like this had met their day decades ago. It isn’t as though Brannan writes poorly, just that there isn’t any originality in his story. If he’s after a writing career, Brannan needs to stay with adventure books than trying to mish-mash into our genre.

GF Willmetts

February 2014

(pub: Headline. 389 page small enlarged paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-7553-9684-9)

check out website: www.headline.co.uk

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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