Genre: Sci-Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
Universal Buy Link | Amazon | Goodreads
About The Book
Lovable loner Casey Isaac thinks love isn’t for him. Not since extraordinary events left him with supernormal powers and a great deal of trauma. But when Oscar Kenzari looks at him, he can’t help but change his mind.
As Divinators, Casey and Oscar have used their psychic powers to defend humanity from sentient, extradimensional storms for one hundred years.
But a storm more powerful than any before is brewing. MaalenKun, prince of the maelstrom, conqueror of countless realities, plans to turn the tables by infecting Casey’s mind.
MaalenKun is not the only threat.
Casey and Oscar must determine who they can trust: the eccentric trillionaire keeping them in the dark, the independent contractors with secrets of their own, or a seemingly helpful extradimensional being shrouded in mystery.
As Casey works to defeat threats around and within himself, he must open to love for his chosen family, for Oscar, and for himself to unlock a transformative power capable of banishing MaalenKun. And Oscar must make a difficult choice that could cost him the future he dreams of.
Can Casey and Oscar’s love break the storm?
The Review
The setting of T.Q. Sims’s striking sci-fi fantasy novel is in the 2130s, on an earth compromised not only by climate change, but by an unexpected apocalyptic attack of a massive sentient storm cloud that arrives by way of a dimensional rift in the universe. That sentient storm, “an extradimensional threat that weaponizes the world’s hatred and fear;” tries to destroy the earth; but rather than destroying the world, it changes it.
Got that?
The flip side of things in this future world is a space force of soldiers known as divinators, who have enormous psychic powers triggered in a certain number of those who have survived the apocalyptic storms. These people, referred to as Risen, stop aging, and have been trained over many decades to share enormous psychic powers with their peers. All of these divinators are connected by a mental network that seems based in a supercharged kind of transcendental meditation process. Through this process they can communicate telepathically, heal, comfort, and strengthen their fellows.
This remarkable psychic network is rich with ethnic and cultural diversity from around the globe, but also embraces gender and sexual diversity—a theme that becomes critical in the story.
In the opening chapters we meet the two central characters, Casey Isaac, who survives an attack in South Los Angles, and Oscar Kenzari, who survives a simultaneous attack in Tamil Nadu. Casey is a tech designer who has lived for over a century on a space station called Scire, while Oscar is a career pilot on a spaceship fondly referred to as Old Girl. Neither man has aged since his rising, and their meeting is clearly more than a happy accident.
While the space-age future is comfortably within the tropes of sci-fi storytelling, the psychic aspect of the story—which plays out in all of the battle scenes—is heavily laced with terminology rooted in Eastern spiritualism. Oscar and Casey are part of a team whose motto is “bright faith will be our weapons, our method, and our superpower.” Action sequences are filled with terminology such as light-line and heartstar and mindfield. It is both fascinating and at times difficult to follow. While they are soldiers mandated to protect the earth and its people, their mantra is one of love and caring, of emotional triage and nurturing their compatriots.
There is also a substantial subplot devoted to greedy corporations, megalomaniac billionaires, and rude, entitled tourists. I rather loved this aspect of the book.
Although I found myself exhausted now and again just trying to keep up, I was also deeply moved by the author’s narrative choices, particularly his embrace of “queer” characters and a particularly powerful appearance of the rainbow as a visual metaphor.
Of course, the neat and tidy ending I always want was not here; but there is a bright vision in this book that promises fulfillment in the next chapter. I’ll be sure to stay tuned, because I’m not letting this story go.
The Reviewer
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