The Pixelated Geek crew is prepping for Comic-Con, so there’s just enough time for a quick book review before the festivities start. And since there may be an upcoming podcast on fan-fiction, the review this week will be for something that’s every fan-fic’s writer’s dream: fan-fiction that’s been published with permission from the author of the original work.
Hugh Howey’s novel Sand created a future Earth that’s been ravaged by environmental disaster, leaving plenty of unanswered questions. What turned the planet into an endless desert? Who runs the distant camps where the bombs fall all day, every day? Is there more technology like the thought-controlled dive suits buried in the lost city of Danver? And how exactly did someone manage to bomb the city wall and bury Springston in an avalanche of sand? In a spin-off authorized by Hugh Howey himself, Timothy attempts to answer some of these questions with his debut novel Scavenger: Evolution.
“You low-town folk fail to appreciate the peril our world has thrown our way. You work yourselves to the bone, racing to build lives higher than the sand, farther and farther from the water you spend a lifetime retrieving.”
Timothy Ward was inspired to write Scavenger by a passage from Sand, about scavengers searching through the ruins of the town of Springston. The book follows one of these scavengers, a former sand-diver named Rush who’s spent the last two years working as a janitor in a brothel, drinking himself into numbness to try to forget the death of his son. Drawn into a plot by the mysterious Warren, Rush narrowly survives the bombing of the city, and now he has to atone for what was done with his help (however unwilling) as well as trying to make up for abandoning his grieving wife for two years. His best friend Avery convinces him to flee with Rush’s wife and several other city dwellers. Their goal is a hidden cavern that Avery insists will lead straight to Danver, the now mythical city filled with the lost treasures of the ancients. But Rush soon realizes that Avery’s interested in more than just a treasure hunt, and that Danver contains technology much more advanced than anything that could have been created on Earth.
Scavenger was originally released in three installments: Red Sands, Blue Dawn, and Twin Suns. As Timothy Ward’s first book, the dialogue can occasionally be a little stilted, and the prose comes across as a bit too flowery at times (a phrase like “River’s elongated cry soured in his heart’s infection…” is rather poetic, but it feels like it’s trying too hard.) The author’s strength is in the action scenes. The sand-diving technology has endless potential, and Ward does an excellent job with creating some stunningly visual scenes where the characters swim through the earth and use the fields created by their dive suits to create sand vortexes or underground battering rams. The action scenes become even more vivid later in the book when the characters stumble across traps, weapons, and something that’s been lying in wait, and which has its own plans for humanity.
The sand-diving setting is really just the jumping off point for the book. The author has a lot of ideas about what’s really going on in Danver, about the advanced technology that’s being chased after by several different groups behind the scenes, and what that technology can do to the ones who find it; the word “Evolution” is in the title for a reason. Ward himself describes the novel as “a kind of Dune meets Alien combination of exploration and fear,” and since the novel ends on a cliffhanger, it’s clear that he plans on following this story even further in the future.