We've all read stories with surprise endings. There's nothing new there. It's not like O. Henry was born last week. As a matter of fact, there are few things less surprising than a big plot twist at the end of a book or movie. It happens a lot. If it's done well it works, but it's been done to death.
What's a little more surprising is reading a book (I suppose it could apply to consuming any type of story, actually) and being surprised by your reaction to it. I mean, M.A. Rothman's Primordial Threat is a great story. It's well named. Things are constantly happening. Just when you think you've got a handle on the situation, things get worse. The primary threat has the potential to be world-ending. It's a miniature black hole that comes cruising right through the middle of the Solar System. It's going to end all human life and there is nothing we can do to stop it from going where it is going. The secondary threat is a group of religious fanatics that want to keep humanity from surviving the menace. It's a romping good time and oh my god is it intense.
The part that surprised me though, at least about myself, is that I love a good villain. I like to root against someone I can hate. Think about it. Have any of you read Dragons of Spring Dawning? (Spoilers, I guess. I mean, the book came out in 1985, so it's not like you haven't had the chance to read it yet.) Takhisis (queen of evil/Satan analogue) is about to arrive on the world of Krynn to commit genocide on the elves and enslave everyone else. Life sucks. We've spent three books leading up to this moment and our heroes are going to lose and let this evil bitch take over the world. Except it doesn't work out that way. The world is saved and the psycho hose beast is dispatched back to the Abyss where she belongs. Partly, I was happy that the good guys won. But I was freaking ecstatic to see that wench get hers. And that's the thing that surprised me about Primordial Threat.
The primary “villain” isn't a villain. It's a black hole. I'm not usually a fan of books with a mindless threat. There's a reason I don't talk much about the Dragonriders of Pern series. That reason is simple: It sucked. The threat from thread falling mindlessly from the sky was just not enough to keep me interested. I mean, the main characters are cool and it's fun watching old and new interact but UGH! Get a real villain.
Somehow, Rothman manages to make his black hole work though. I mean, you can't really hate the thing. It's a force of nature just doing what it does. On the other hand, you find yourself rooting for those plucky little humans anyway. Somehow, some way, a black hole is not a dud for a villain the way thread was. The threat is real. It's immediate and it's nasty. It just works.
Of course, a cast of heroes is necessary to any successful story and this book has just enough of them to work. I really feel like Primordial Threat could have turned into some world spanning, nine hundred and seventy three thousand character book with a Dramatis Personae at the end but it didn't. Listen, I'm as big a fan of David Weber's Safehold series and I love just about everything that Harry Turtledove has ever published. The fact remains that not every story works like that and I don't think this one would have. Rothman gave us just the right amount of people to move things along and avoided using too many and bogging things down.
These characters all not all the perfect type either. We've got one legitimate nutcase, the guy who helped her escaped from the psych ward, a president that doesn't tell the public the whole truth because it's in their best interests to not be informed and all kinds of weird problems. It provides me with an interesting conundrum: I wonder if all of these people could work together if the literal extinction in the human species wasn't in the offing. If this were an attempt at doing everyday research and possibly winning a Nobel Prize could they all hold it together? I'm not sure and honestly, it's probably a more entertaining story this way anyway.
I don't have the background is science or engineering to really make an evaluation of the tech in this book. It sounds pretty well grounded in the hard sciences, but I'm the guy who only completed one year as a chemistry major and this is all tech that would be better evaluated by a physicist anyway. Suffice it to say that it seems to work and it feels right. There are a couple of major scientific advances featured, but it all seems to work the way it should from a layman's point of view. Part of it is even based on work by a scientist that I'm somewhat familiar with. I don't want to reveal more than that.
I do have one complaint about Primordial Threat. There is a real deus ex machina moment that I find a bit annoying. I mean, here we are with this all star team of scientists and engineers and that's what it takes to get the job done? It adds a lot of tension to the story, but I still find it annoying, especially since it kind of comes out of left field. Parts of it are foreshadowed, but parts of it are not. I found myself shaking my head for a minute at one point. As a plot device, it kind of works and it does get things to where they need to be but, yeah. It's taking things a bit far in my opinion. Honestly though, Primordial Threat does work up to that point and it's nowhere near being a story ruiner.
Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Wandering Asteroids.
Primordial Threat
M.A. Rothman
Self Published, 2018
Primordial Threat is available for purchase at the following link:
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