The Third Thaw by Karl J. Hanson came out this year and is a Science Fiction novel set in the not so distance future. In this tale, Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid, so the USA and Germany send human embryos to a far flung star to insure the continuation of the human species.
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: E.L. Marker
Published: 2018
Reviewer Rating: 2.5 Stars
Reviewer: Michael D. Griffiths
Advanced robots help birth and then raise the children. The USA team is set to have four ‘Thaws.’ Each thaw is a group of less than a twenty individuals who are spaced out five years from each other. The third thaw is set to head to the German camp once they turn twenty-one as were the previous two Thaws.
After years of preparation and training, the Third Thaw heads through lands filled with sail back dinosaurs and dangerous man eating fish. They eventually reach the German camp and find them a friendly group, with only one unfinished mission and this is to find a missing team who went after a super computer which landed five hundred miles away. Luckily in this primitive world, they have bi-planes and with three Americas set off to find the missing team.
This novel is more of an exploration into how colonization of a new planet could work than the story of the people who do so. The Point of View sort of jumps from omnipotent to person to person as the author sees fit. The people oscillate between living primitively to building planes and four wheel drive trucks. Character development is set aside to focus on the micro details of engineering. In many ways this seems more like an author picking everything he is good at and writing a novel to illustrate all he knows, instead of telling a story. There are good parts, but the characters are flat and no action takes place until the reader has passed through a third of the book. Even then, there are only a few doses of action within the novel, which mostly concerns a lot of happy people, who all get along, and build this new world in fast forward.
If a reader would enjoy exploring the nuts and bolts techniques which would be used to construct humanity on a new planet, this might be the book for you. If action or strong characters are you passion, I would steer clear of this one.
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