Jeremy Robinson's Infinite - First Book of the Infinite Timeline
Infinite (Infinite Timeline)
From the Back cover
SEARCHING FOR A NEW HOME...
The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries fifty scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope.
After ten years in a failed cryogenic bed--body asleep, mind awake--William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.
It is not the last.
When he wakes from death, William discovers that all but one crew member--Capria Dixon--is either dead at Tom's hands, or escaped to the surface of Kepler 452b. This dire situation is made worse when Tom attacks again--and is killed. Driven mad by a rare reaction to extended cryo-sleep, Tom hacked the Galahad's navigation system and locked the ship on a faster-than-light journey through the universe, destination: nowhere. Ever.
Mysteriously immortal, William is taken on a journey with no end, where he encounters solitary desperation, strange and violent lifeforms, a forbidden love, and the nature of reality itself.
...HE DISCOVERS THE INFINITE.
Reviewing the Long and the Short of the Book
The Short (Reviewed in 2019 when I first read the book)
Reminded me of Jeremy Robinson's wildly addictive Jack Sigler series.
Retrospections and ruminations. Good alternative theories and parallel paths. Story unraveled during the last quarter, gaining some predictability but was sufficiently fast paced like a Hollywood thriller on steroids, to make the end palatable.
Not having read his Kaizu thrillers but a fan of his Jack Sigler novels where Jeremy had already broached immortality with similar parallel story as here in Infinite. Jacks return to the present seemed quite similar to this with an added Sci-fi edge and a poignant love story
All in all worth a read and will appeal to the part of us which wants to look beyond boundaries.
The Long (A fresh review of the book after re-reading it over the last couple of weeks)
Methinks that like every other human from the dawn of time and the evolution of man, I too have been deeply fascinated by Space and the skies above (cant speak for the other numerous species since I cant read minds). The fascination reached Everest heights when I first saw Star Trek Reruns of the original series with Shatner and team exploring the horizon and beyond).
I have always wanted to incorporate the star trek version of deep space exploration in some of my blogs and got the opportunity here with having read this book a second time to understand why I have not been able to bring myself to write something on the sequel (Infinite 2) which was for me a big pain to complete.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
So, when I came across The Gallahad, in this book a ship that holds the HOPE for humanity, it immediately resonated in me as a Trekkie, being somewhat similar to the journey of Enterprise in the beloved series that spawned many arcs.
Here we have humanity's last hope for resettlement gone awry.
The imagination and forlornness of knowing that you are the last human and knowing also that you are immortal, what would the knowledge and despair do to you. Drive you to desperation absolutely but what can you do. The viable options for a regular human is gone. everything is unviable from the point you wake up.
You cannot RIP. But you can die. William finds it the hard way with one of his friends and colleagues who woke up early and went Jack the Ripper on everybody else except one. The one woman who also happens to be William's dream girl. William's single minded obsession with this woman fuels several reams of this book.
In these continuous moments of despair Infinite scores by bringing on a subtle romance that will last lifetimes, but with an AI that he created and which subsequently turned hostile and the walls between reality and VR (virtual reality) are continually blurred to the point where both co-exist but there are no seams and everything seems continuous.
The love story is the effective part of this book and AI makes for an enigmatic companion. The story weaves through lifetimes and so many Inception like twists. The understanding that it could all be a simulation takes the book into different levels.
But its the love story for eternity that seems to be the heart of this book.
Jeremy has excelled in books about creatures, kaiju's, SF and here he explores something along a different plane from his regular books.
Really gives the reader a rush once you get used to the slow pace of the book and the meandering mind games that come along.
Recommend this as a great read. Would rate this a 4 star book.
This is also the first book in Jeremy Robinson's 13 book gala extravaganza - The Infinite Timeline
I have earlier reviewed The Dark which is the 8th book in the series.
If you like this one then please read, like and share my other reviews here @ Blogger and also @Goodreads -
Intriguing sounding story. Have read the Kaiju novels of the author. Will give this a try. Thanks
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