Vast, ideologically rich, and scientifically bold.
Cook delivers an ambitious fusion of mythic history, Cold War thriller, and spacefaring adventure in his latest novel. Millennia after freeing enslaved humans, Ithyanna is thrown into the Vietnam DMZ in 1967 and captured aboard a vast alien starship with U.S. and North Vietnamese pilots. A crashed probe triggers a dangerous convergence of five powers—American, Soviet, Chinese, and two alien forces. The stakes escalate beyond the Cold War as the device threatens to reshape history, destabilize spacetime, or preserve the Universe’s fate.
Cook builds a universe that feels thoughtfully layered. The alien species and their societies have believable tensions and technological identities. Ithyanna emerges as a character not defined solely by myth but by the responsibility of her past actions and the unintended impact they had. The contrast between human warfare and sophisticated alien civilizations is striking, and the story resists diminishing Earth’s conflicts in the face of cosmic scale. Rather than rendering global tensions trivial, Cook positions them as integral to the plot, implying that mankind’s ambitions (and missteps) resonate well beyond its homeworld. Although the novel’s scope is vast, its cast extensive, and the prose dense, particularly in technical and political descriptions, those willing to immerse themselves will find a story that rewards attention.
A sweeping science fiction epic that asks whether humanity—on Earth or beyond—can learn from its past, and what burden falls on those who carry history’s lessons across time and space.
Coming soon
ISBN 9798275904963
