NEW SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY REVIEWS
Reviews Of Recently Published Science Fiction And Fantasy Books
Reviewer: Forrest Schultz schultz_forrest@yahoo.com 770-583-3258
Blog Address: http://newsciencefictionandfantasyreviews.blogspot.com
December 22, 2010
A Christian Fiction Version of "Heroes"
A review of
Stephen R. Wilson The Gifted, Book 1: In The Beginning (self-published, 2010)
$12.00 314 pp ISBN: 978-0-615-40421-9
Reviewed by: Forrest Schultz
The book under review here immediately reminded me of the television series "Heroes". I do not want to say much more about the comparison than that because I never got around to watching all the shows in the series. The main parallel I would like to draw is the mystery of how these "heroes" received their supernatural gifts and why.
In The Gifted we are told that the gifts were given to these people by an extraterrestrial civilization intending to use them in its war against another ET civilization. This we learn at the beginning and the end of the book. But that does not completely solve the mystery because of the ambiguity of the exact nature of this group. A few of their names sound like Biblical ones -- Trinity and Zedek Kessed; but most of the names are those of the ancient Greek deities: Zeus and Hermes and Dionysus and Athena and Apollo. And the comments on the rear jacket of the book indicate that whatever plans for these gifted children which these extraterrestrials do have may be oveturned by "Someone" (presumably referring to God) who "has entirely different plans for them".
This is not to be unexpected when we consider that the author, Stephen Wilson, is a Pastor and the book is a work of Christian Fiction. Wilson, in fact, is so concerned about Christian Fiction, that he not only is writing his own, but also does a lot of reviewing of Christian Fiction, and that he is an active member of The Lost Genre Guild, whose members are Christian authors of science fiction and fantasy (and other types of "speculative" fiction). Information about him and his writing activities is available at http://thegiftedbookseries.webs.com.
The characters in Wilson's story are interesting and well-developed and the action is fast paced and holds the reader's attention. But, frankly, I did NOT like the inordinate amount of jumping back and forth in time. It was not really needed for the story and tends to confuse the reader.
Book 1 ends with The Gifted, now adolescents, being brought together and readied for transport to their destiny in outer space. I intend to read the following books in the series to discover what awaits these superheroes there: will they boldly go where no man has gone before?? What will they do and how will God overrule the plans the ETs have for them. This I am anxious to discover in the rest of the series.
No comments:
Post a Comment