Emergence by Nick M. Lloyd

I've posted my full review of Emergence, the debut novel by fellow Chrons member @FibonacciEddie on my personal website here.

OK, Chrons rules: here is the full review, no need to follow the link

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During conversations upon the SFF Chronicles forum, I came across Emergence, a SF conspiracy thriller by Nick M. Lloyd. After a brief conversation with Nick I decided that this would be the next book to read.

There are two main settings in which events take place: firstly Earth, through the central human characters of journalist with a grudge Louise, her physicist hubby Jeff Harding, their other physicist pal Mike, and Jack Bullage, a shady businessman, car-crash survivor and the subject of Louise’s grudges; and secondly a nameless spacecraft, stationed somewhere a hundred miles above our planet, where a crew of seemingly emotionally-unstable reptilian humanoid creatures known as the Gadium act as benign dictators, or stewards, for various intergalactic planets, of which Earth is only one. The Gadium see it as their duty to shepherd a planet to Emergence – a state of the alteration of that planet’s population akin to a giant evolutionary leap, allowing the planet’s inhabitants to use increased psychic gifts.

The idea of the Emergence is a neat one, and elevates the story from being another humdrum conspiracy thriller into a real SF-thinker, bringing in wider themes such as the morality of physics (particularly implications for free will versus predetermination) and the imposition of huge centralized state surveillance (in the form of both the Earth Governments and the aliens) versus good old fashioned liberty. Lloyd’s love and enthusiasm for theoretical physics and quantum theory is clear, and he helpfully uses a number of clever analogies to explain some of the weirder theories (Many Worlds, Copenhagen etc) to the layreader. Having said that, he fails to explain Jeff’s Dragon’s Door analogy, which left me a little disappointed… come on, Nick, tell us what it is!

The dichotomy between the settings also marks a kind of dichotomy of tone and pace as well. The Earth scenes are terrific – they are snappy, humorous, and the chemistry works really very well between all the characters concerned. The dialogue between the three leads in particular is homely, genuine and spiked with just enough acerbic wit and bite so as not to feel too comfortable. Supporting characters like academic Bob and reformed gangster Willis are written well and don’t feel one-dimensional, although Willis seems a little underused for my taste.

Contrarily, the Gadium scenes are a little stiff, especially in the early scenes. I postulated upon this, and decided that, from a personal perspective, I found it very difficult to care or sympathise with either Aytch or Justio, the two Gadium leads, even though they are revealed to have very different motivations and justifications for their actions towards the end of the story. I think this is because both creatures are non-human, and both represent a sort of sprawling, not-benign statism which runs contrary to ideas of human liberty. In the end I found myself echoing the old Henry Kissinger line; when asked who he would prefer to win the Iran-Iraq war, he replied: "it's a shame they can't both lose". Even though Justio and Aytch are different, I found their differences to be overwhelmed by their sameness.

This sameness made the middle sections of the book sag ever so slightly, because I found it difficult to care about the backstories of Aytch and Justio, and there are a couple of chapters where the writing threatens to veer into info-dump territory; luckily, Lloyd is quick to return to Earth each time, where the conflict, threat and humour is something the reader can believe and empathise with much more easily. And, after the halfway point, the book picks up in pace in a big way, and accelerates towards a very tense and taut action-packed climax, where events both on and above Earth intertwine in a satisfying resolution, and there’s a tantalizing clue as to the direction of where the intergalactic story goes next.

From a technical viewpoint, some of the Gadium dialogue jars slightly – they seem to dispense with Earth colloquialisms slightly too often for my liking – would a reptilian refer to himself as being painted into a corner? Unless they’ve built their galactic empire based on painting and decorating, I’d say not. Still, it's better than the potentially terrifying parallel universe in which the Emergence/Dirty-Dancing mash-up leads to the line: "Nobody puts Justio in a corner!" According to Many Worlds theory, this must have already happened, somewhere.

Furthermore, the number of POV characters seems to swell inexplicably around the halfway point, with some characters given only a paragraph or two of POV, third-person close narration time, and then it’s taken away, which seems stilted and pointless.

Lloyd knows how to handle a McGuffin and knows how to throw in a red herring too, leaving just enough clues (a Fibonacci sequence, a secret MOD project, car accident survivors, and more) but knows not to dwell on each artefact too long for fear it becoming hackneyed or stilted, and the plot moves along, in general, with snap and relish.

The presentation of the book (I noticed only six very minor typos throughout – a great effort for a large self-published novel), the professional polish and the neat, pacy writing voice that Lloyd brings to Emergence make it, as I have already stated, the best independent book I have read so far, and I would highly recommend it to any lover of SF, conspiracy thrillers.

I promise a "Blog" on the Dragon Behind the Door in the next week or so...

It started out in the manuscript as a ~400 word (almost) monologue told in the pub by Jeff (but really attributed to Mike Littlejohn - aka 'the brains'), but I cut it as it crowded the scene out too much...

...and I felt sad

it will rise again!