Are You Boys Cooking Up There? Are You Building an Interoicter?

WARNING: Spoilers.

There are two ways to go with science fiction. You can go the way where a good, science-based tale is told through the eyes and ears and minds of characters you like, but who don’t necessarily get in the way of the science. Then there are those characters who show up and demand FULL ATTENTION while the science just kinda happens in the background, and you leave disappointed that the book wasn’t better.

The latter is the case with Matthew Mather’s “Nomad,” a book I really wanted to like, but one that, at the end, is meh.

Is there time, I ask, for relationship-based jealousy as the world ends around you? The answer to Mather appears to be yes (and sets us up NICELY for the villain of the next book in the trilogy).

Also, can a bunch of refugees really hide from an phenomenon that incudes massive earthquakes and volcanic action in an area already naturally prone to such disaster by hiding in CAVES? I had a hard time with that part of the story.

Mather tells a good tale, and his science, with a few exceptions, seems to be okay. But those characters demanding full attention? They got in the way. A lot.

And it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why. The characters in, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” don’t exactly sit back while science happens to them. But there is enough plausible awe in them that they keep themselves in check as they go about their sciencey explorations. Not so with Mather’s characters, who are all sorts of irrational as the irrational goes on alongside them. Want to settle a century-old bout of bad blood? Make sure you’re doing it as the world is ending around you. And by all means compress Armageddon, terrorism, and sexy times into as few days as possible just to make sure you hit the socio/religio/economical BINGO card as much as you can.

The best disaster stories are those where the protagonists don’t know what’s going on all around the world; they struggle to know what’s going on just in their tiny little neck of the woods.

This book smacks of building an interocitor. You have the plan, you know you’ve got 2,535 parts, and by golly you’re going to follow the plan and use all those parts, no matter if they’re related to soft-serve technology. Nomad checks off the boxes, but it’s poorly written. Every time you see a spool of magnetic tape, or a floppy disc, or a compact disc, the author’s going to remind you of the era that item is from. The opening paragraphs should be your first clue:

“Big enough to what?”

“Destroy the entire solar system,” repeated Dr. Muller, a sixty-something, pot-bellied man with thick spectactles below a tangle of gray hair. “And the Earth with it.”

Ben Rollins stared at him in dumbfounded silence and rubbed his bleary eyes. “That what I thought you said.” He wiped his hands down his face to pinch the bridge of his nose between his forefingers, squeezing his eyes shut. Opening them, he brought his hands away from his face together, as if in prayer, and exhaled slowly.”