By: Graham E Howarth
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What happens when humans discover that they are not alone in the vastness of the Universe?
Theodore Newsome’s space cadet training is abruptly cut short not far from completion. That is one of the first consequences. He is thrown in at the deep end along with three of his fellow space cadets. It is a deep end that could be bottomless.
Contact with aliens was not meant to be like this, especially as a threat to an alien race could soon become a threat to the human race.
Graham E Howarth is a retired primary school head teacher who lives in Bury, Lancashire.
He is married to Helen and has two daughters, Sarah and Kate.
Alliance is the first novel in his Far Future trilogy that moves on to Containment and then Infinity.
He has also written his autobiography, If Only I’d Asked, plus The Burrs Country Park, Bury, a record in poems and pictures, including a brief history of the park. Both have been self-published for local sale. A History of The Burrs, Bury will also be published locally in 2022.
He has been a science fiction aficionado for many years.
This is an enjoyable sci-fi novel for all ages, upwards of early teens. It reads a bit like a script for a new Star Trek movie, in terms of plot and character, but that’s a good thing.
Theodore Newsome is a 21-year-old trainee space cadet. Earth has been devastated by inter-planetary species warfare and mankind is in the process of looking to settle on a new home planet.
Theodore, alongside three other space cadets training at the World Space Agency Naval Command, benefit from neural implants that give them a kind of hi-tech, telepathic capability.
The cadets are called upon to investigate The Cube, a huge alien portal to the world of the Tressillians, who are a peaceable, technologically advanced, alien species.
The Tressillians as a race, are faced with an existential threat from another alien species, the Atarians, who are war-mongering and hyper-violent (think Klingons), and remorseless in their goal to conquer all and any universes they encounter...
As I read this tale, about mankind joining forces with the Tressilians, to take arms against the raiding Atarians, I couldn’t help but discern a (probably unintended) parallel with what’s happening in Europe at the moment, although I’m sure that wasn’t in the mind of the author when composing this work of fiction.
The scenes of intergalactic space battles are tense and well-staged, and as I read the book, I could easily see it converted into a movie for the big screen, as a Star Trek-type sci-fi actioner.
The prose style is punchy and efficient, and I liked the conceptual idea of higher-level communication between species in the form of a manufactured, quasi-telepathy, which glued the different strands of the tale together.
Personally, I’d have liked just a little more descriptive detail about the physical appearance of the various alien life forms, although this didn’t stop me from enjoying the book. It did occur to me that this novel might have been enhanced if it had included a few color (or even black and white) images of some of the aliens and/or their spacecraft, but that’s just a personal preference of mine.
Overall, an engaging sci-fi tale that I enjoyed at the age of 55, and I’m sure that I’d have enjoyed it just as much if I was a teenage lad, i.e. at a time when I first started reading the likes of Asimov and Frank Herbert.
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