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
February 27, 2012
A Space Age Moses Featured In
Bryan Thomas Schmidt's Debut SF Novel
A review of
Bryan Thomas Schmidt The Worker Prince (Pittsford, MI: Dimished Media Group, 2012)
292 pp $14.99 ISBN: 9781453718988
Reviewer: Forrest W. Schultz
Many interesting stories -- in real life as well as in fiction -- have begun with a woman raising an abandoned baby. Probably the best known and most significant of these stories was Pharoah's daughter raising the baby Moses whom she found in a basket in a river. Bryan Thomas Schmidt in his debut novel tells a story like this which is appropriate for the Space Age. Taking his cue from Superman's father Jor-El, he tells us of a specially designed spaceship carrying a baby boy to another planet. In this case, the boy is found and raised by the sister of the High Lord Councilor of the Borali Alliance of Planets. The parallel continues when the baby -- Davi -- grows up and learns that his biological parents are Vertullians, a planet of slaves with whom he sides in their struggle for freedom.
The analogy with the story of Moses also includes the religious backgrounds of the dramatis personae: the members of the Borali Alliance are polytheists, and the Vertullian slaves are monotheists. (They are descendants of Evangelical Christians from Earth.) It is easy for the author to empathize with the Vertullians because he himself is a Christian, which he tells us in the Acknowledgements section, where he thanks God for giving him his writing ability and for His Providence in making the writing and publishing of the book possible.
[Schmidt also thanks the Lost Genre Guild for their encouragment, and I too would like here to express my thanks to the LGG for the new Christian writers of science fiction and fantasy I have come to know through the LGG email discussion group.]
However, the story itself only provides us with a few glimpses of the Vertullians' Christianity, and tells us almost nothing about the religion of the Borali Alliance members. The stress of the book is on the action and on the character development, both of which are very well crafted. And, although the spaceships and other space age machinery have verisimilitude, there is no discussion of the technology or science behind them, as is found in "hard" SF. For this reason it is appropriate, as the rear jacket indicates, to classify this tale as "space opera".
That is about all I wish to say except for encouraging you to read the story, which I have found to be "notwannaputdownable".
The Worker Prince is Book One of The Saga of Davi Rhii. Book Two, which is scheduled for release in the Summer of 2012, is titled The Returning. Information on the author is available on his website www.bryanthomasschmidt.net.
No comments:
Post a Comment