The Last Oracle

Managed to read this book in a day and half during my wedding vacation! The Last Oracle is yet another fast paced sci-fi historical thriller by James Rollins featuring the SIGMA team.

The story begins at the sanctum of the Oracle of Delphi where the Oracle smuggles a dark-haired autistic girl out of clutches of the Roman Church. Around the 1950s-60s, a wing of the Russian army invades a mysterious gypsy camp stealing a pair of autistic savant twins based on Nazi war documents.

Cut to the present scene where Gray Pierce is involved in a shoot out that kills a drifter close to the SIGMA headquarters. Before dying, the man places an ancient coin bearing the Delphi symbol in Gray’s hands. In a matters of hours, an autistic girl Sasha is reported missing at the Washington DC zoo by her Russian grandfather and an entire division of FBI is out searching for her. She however, turns up at the doorstep of SIGMA quarters with the gypsies in tow.

The dead man is identified as Dr. Polk who’s gone missing in Northern India and a little research bring SIGMA team in touch with Dr. Elizabeth Polk, Professor Polk’s daughter. Sasha guides SIGMA in their adventure with her ability to see into the future. Armed with her sketches and guidance from Elizabeth, the team retraces Dr. Polk’s route in India into the nuclear ruins of Chernobynsk in Russia which leads them to a group of autistic children who are being used to create a new world. Alongside, 3 unusual children, a chimp and a man with no memories race against time and radioactive countryside in a bid to stop one of the Russian ops.

Behind these nefarious ops is the Russian senator Nikolas Romanov who will stop at nothing to rule the world as the next messiah with the aid of the autistic savants. Connecting this chain of events is an ancient prophecy foretold by the last Oracle of Delphi. The events take a nasty turn however, when Sasha’s brother Pyotr, dies fulfilling the prophecy.The questions that still remain, one that’s sure to baffle you is did Pyotr really die and if so, who’s living in his body? And does Gray find his friend Monk, who is lost and presumed dead? What role does the autistic chimp play in this chaotic adventure?

The plotlines are parallel with Monk, Gray and Painter having equally tough tasks to accomplish. Its as if Rollins had decided to give equal priority to all 3 protagonists at the same time through this book. Realism is brought in through a almost perfect blend of the old world vs the new, heightened through an intricate web interwoven with ancient history and a medical condition that seems to have inspired some of the revolutionary advances in human history. I certainly enjoying reading about the Oracle of Delphi and about the Roma gypsies. Rollins’ thorough research had ensured that the book was complete with all the right facts. The mind-boggling fact however remains…how the heck does a soul switch happen?! A good book for private collection!

Black Order

Black Order is the 3rd installment in the Sigma Series by James Rollins. The book covers Gray Pierce and his team’s adventures as they race against time and a bunch of dangerous fanatics to find out a cure for a degenerative disease caused at Quantum levels.

1945 May 4, we see a scientist die trying to save a perfect blue eyed boy from the Germans. The boy is taken in by a Polish priest. Cut to the present day…

Gray Pierce is busy trailing a pair of twins at an auction in Copenhagen while his director Peter Crowe was last seen at a buddhist village in the himalayas where mysterious lights were noticed. A new character, Dr. Lisa Cummings gets embroiled in this latest adventure when she unknowingly volunteers to accompany a monk to the village.

The monks are dead…having suffered with a mysterious illness that strips them of their sanity. That and being chased by a hulky German just sums up the situation under which Lisa meets Crowe and the Germans – Anna and her brother Gunther who have access to a mysterious device. There is more to the mysterious lights it seems…for they are produced by the Bell, a quantum measuring device aka a zero point energy generator, with the potential to alter the process of evolution as well as create a new race of superhumans.

Enter an ancient, rich family with German roots in South Africa who knows more than what they reveal about the Bell and are determined to destroy the world with this deadly knowledge. The events occur simultaneously in 4 different places – South Africa, Nepal, Washington and Denmark. The plot throws abundant information on Nazi mysticism, Runes symbolising the Black Sun while playing around with the concepts of superhumans. A typical mishmash found in a scifi thriller.

Darwin’s theories have always been contested by modern science…but these very same theories combined with Planck’s Quantum Physics form the base for this plot.

Altar of Eden

James Rollins latest sci-fi fantasy installment is out on the shelves… I suppose since a few months. And it happened to be the perfect fast paced read for my flight back from SF to LA.

So far I had read the SIGMA order series..atleast a couple of books and found them to be intriguing although the scientific explanation could get a bit tedious after a while.

In any case, Altar of Eden seemed to be the perfect title for an action plot centered around fractals, genetic mutations and throwbacks. The basic storyline is Dr. Lorna Polk, a veterinarian in charge of the genetic re-engineering lab at ACRES gets caught up in a murky and deadly plot when she is summoned by Jack Menard and his team to investigate a bizarre trawler wreck close to Bayou. There they discover many exotic animals including a parrot that keeps calculating the real value of Pi and notice that one ferocious creature, a sabre-tooth jaguar is missing. The only clue is a couple of animals with identical chromosome anomaly,  a bloody and terrifying trail that leads to Bayou backwaters.

En route the hunt, the team discovers intriguing yet astonishingly strange patterns in all the rescued animals and the chase ends in many revelations all leading to secret government organizations and illegal funding for bio-warfare. Lorna, Jack and their team mates not only discover the source behind these experiments but also realize that this organization has transcended boundaries enough to create similar anomalies in humans in order to recreate the perfect Eve and Adam. Only problem is that this recreation back fires with deadly consequences.

How it all ends is something to rather read and discover. True to Rollins’ writing-style, the book is fast paced with enough bloodshed, action and plenty of nerve wracking adventure. He also shows off his research on brainwaves, neurons and fractals not to mention the concept of universal consciousness and thought pattern. My only grouse is that the plot seemed kind of washed out towards the end as if the author was in a hurry to conclude the book and move on to the next. But I’d recommend this any day over Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol.

Subterranean

Subterranean Cover Art

I don’t quite remember how I stumbled upon James Rollins’ books but I quite liked reading them since I’m partial to sci-fi fantasy genres a lot after the romantic-comedy and contemporary literature ofcourse. One of the first books in my collection was Subterranean (don’t have it anymore).

So I picked up Subterranean mainly for its intriguing plot featuring journey to the center of the earth and encountering ancient species unknown to mankind. Like any other books of a scifi/fantasy/adventure genres plots, this one also features a team of high profile professionals assembled by one enthusiastic Dr. Blakely to search some caves in Antarctica.

The protagonists of this story are Ben, an Australian cave diver with an aboriginal background & a dark past, and Linda, an American biologist and a single mom. The teams descend into the caves and encounter ancient cave dwellings dating back to thousands or millions of years in the main cavern that indicate occupation by dwarf like humanoids.

As they slowly descend into the depths they meet fascinating and terrifying creatures that quickly disperse them in different directions. The team led by Ben (at least the ones who weren’t killed by the creatures) manage to escape the dinosaur like creatures and end up in a colony of aboriginal humanoid marsupial creatures. Imagine 3 feet human with the fur of a Kangaroo complete with a pouch for carrying the young. Gross isn’t it?! But that is what this plot is about. If you think that this is where it ends you are mistaken since there’s more to go.

The author also experiments with the concepts of telepathy and ancient shamanism for good measure – Much to his chagrin, Ben discovers that his aboriginal heritage is based in this small marsupial colony and he is in a way related to these humanoid marsupials. After a couple of more twists and turns (don’t want to post spoilers here), the rest of the team who managed to survive make it back to our modern civilization. Ben however, has obligations to fulfill to his ancestors, and so does remote people/colony management through telepathy (well he can’t just zip across the two locations in a jiffy now can he!!)

On the whole, it was a disappointing read because – 1. The plot was too long and had too many dinos in them, 2. The readers are overloaded with too much info while they are struggling to understand how these ancient species survived millennia under the Earth, 3. An adventure story must be fast moving if it aims at sustaining the readers’ attention.

All said and done, James Rollins’ books seem to be doing quite well in terms of sales because I couldn’t find his latest release ‘The Last Oracle’ for quite some time. Verdict on this one is – don’t read it unless you really love ancient aboriginal species that seem to survive somehow!