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Reunion
Sometimes survival is not enough. Sometimes you need to fight back. The apocalypse ended Nick Gates' night shift as a Portland cop. The armored soldiers trooping out from a massive ziggurat, the death of his partner and the city in ruins terminated his career. Surviving the aftermath of the reunion of parallel earths was a good break. Finding his wife alive was a good break. Assembling a guerrilla resistance against occupiers from the other earth, however, didn't work out so well. But an escapee from an enemy stronghold, bearing with him the possibility of reversing the reunion, brought hope. This hope will require a dangerous trek in search of organized resistance, and, if that succeeds, a mission back into the heart of enemy territory. It will take all of Nick's courage, luck, and skill if he - and humanity - is to survive REUNION. "Ken Lizzi's novel puts a fascinating spin on the time-honored post-apocalypse tale. There is action a-plenty, and the writing is adept and engaging. It's refreshing to see something other than evil vampires or mindless zombies threatening humanity. Nice job, Ken, I look forward to seeing your next effort." Steve Perry, New York Times Bestselling Author
- GenresScience Fiction
228 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 2014
3 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Ken Lizzi
34 books10 followersKen Lizzi is an attorney and the author of an assortment of published short stories. His novels include "Reunion", "Under Strange Suns", "Thick As Thieves", the "Semi-Autos and Sorcery" series, and the "Falchion's Company" series. When not traveling - and he'd rather be traveling - he lives in Texas with his lovely wife Isa and energetic daughter V.V. He enjoys reading, homebrewing, exercise, and visiting new places. He loathes writing about himself in the third person.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 14, 2017
AFTER A STINT IN THE MILITARY, KEN LIZZI took on a new self-appointed mission: to “infuse a pulp sensibility into 21st century fiction and provide literature a shot of two-fisted fabulism.” He does all that and more with the novel “Reunion.”
Never mind that the science is a little soft, the genre all over the map (“post-apocalyptic, science fiction action/adventure fantasy”)—“Reunion” is stellar, especially for military science fiction. I don’t even like military science fiction, but I love “Reunion.” Why? It’s the human component, namely a Portland cop, Nick Gates, who pulls me into his world even though it’s the last place I want to go as a reader. Battles, blood and mangled body parts? I’m outta here. Or I would be, if not for Nick.
Nick is on night duty when the apocalypse begins without a single warning peep from scientists or doomsday prophets. He narrates events as they unfold, and even though “unreliable narrator” is my favorite kind, Nick seems so reliable, honest and sensible, I trust him implicitly.
His sense of duty and fighting spirit and all the usual virtues aren’t what kept me turning pages. It’s the simple, methodical way he thinks. Just when I’ve had enough of the casualties in chapter one, Nick finds his way home, his house intact, his wife sleeping through the alien invasion. His dilemma: “Do I shake her awake and pour out the story of a twisted cityscape and untold deaths? Or would waking her only serve to ruin what might be the last decent night’s sleep of her life?”
Now that’s a man after my own heart.
But it gets even better. When looters smash plate-glass windows, Nick is conflicted: “I was relieved by this additional sign of survivors, but the cop in me was irked at such lawless, uncivilized behavior. I mean, sure, people needed the supplies. But did they need to break the windows?” At that point, there was no doubt I’d keep reading. Without any vandalism, Nick and Trina manage to loot a liquor store. “The end of the world was nothing to face sober,” after all.
Line after line, page after page, Nick fires off random thoughts that show us something that’s all too rare in fiction: a regular guy.
Science fiction fans, however, will want to know about the irregular stuff. There’s plenty of that. A brief shiver runs down the brick walls of a building; a window quivers; a row of Victorian houses appears “to have birthed a—what?” Nick wonders. “A pyramid? A ziggurat?” Burning houses illuminate a surreally altered Portland. Strange, new, but ancient looking buildings rise from the Earth, merging with whatever is in their way, from people to cars and skyscrapers. A man’s head and shoulders emerge from the roof of a car, “torso melded with the front seat,” and a cow is similarly fused, head and front legs protruding from the hood and front bumper.
In a later scene, Nick’s friend shows off the six-pointer he’d bagged. “Then the air sort of thickened, like it became water or something. It rippled. And then, where the man was standing, there was a stone wall ... The ends of antlers still poked out, and below them, the tip of (the guy’s) nose and shoes. One second he was alive,” Nick explains, “the next he was part of a wall. No time to scream, no time to think here it comes.”
Three-fourths of Earth’s population is killed in this sort of Salvador Dali scenario or by the invaders who come “trooping lockstep down the center of the street” in a column, “wide-bladed pole arms glinting above them, like the flickering points of light across a river’s ever shifting surface, their armor rippling like the scaled fish darting below. The front of the column begins peeling off left and right, like the mouth of a delta, each separate strand flowing into a house. Blood then puddles from beneath the doors and out each window.” The soldiers smash open doors, butchering helpless old men and women in their beds. It’s all “remarkably vivid, a lucid daydream.” Except that it’s a living nightmare.
Unlike “The Chaplain’s War” by Brad R. Torgersen (Baen Books), which pits Earthly humans against a very alien race with superior military capabilities, Lizzi’s alien invaders look suspiciously like human beings. Clad in weird armor, their spears “big, ungainly things like something out of a badly dubbed martial arts movie,” they take no prisoners. Fortunately, the bizarre army seems to have arrived with no idea what guns are and what bullets can do. Nick is quick to teach them.
Bullets don’t work on their high priests, however, so things get hot and ugly for whoever shoots at the unarmed, weirdly costumed elite. Nick, who’s been taking down spear-bearers with his service pistol, witnesses this just in the nick of time.
It’s a given that military fiction introduces us to great characters with memorable personalities only to show them die heroically. Don’t get too attached to anyone. Nick’s assorted forays into battle keep his wife on edge, along with readers, but we know he’ll survive. He has to. He’s narrating in first-person point of view. If I suspect an author might kill the protagonist, I’ll skip to the end and skip the book if our hero is doomed.
Even though Nick planted in my mind the same “little horror docudrama” that won’t stop running through the projector in his head, I kept turning pages. The story is excruciating. I hate battle scenes. Part of it is the furtive little fear, deep down, that I could one day face armed soldiers at my door. Shouldn’t I buy a gun and learn to shoot accurately? Nick’s ragtag warriors have no training in weaponry. “C’mon Trina,” one protests. “I read. I watch the History Channel.” Another man after my own heart.
Part of the story’s appeal is that Nick is so easy to identify with. “I never worried about leaving the world a better place,” he tells Trina. “I just wanted to make a good life for you and me, and maybe help a few people, get a few bad guys off the street. But now, if there is any hope left of making a good life for us, I need to try to change the world. Or at least a little part of it.” Nick’s everyman authenticity wins me over in scene after scene.
In spite of being Portlanders, Nick and Trina have the good sense of rural Midwesterners. (I’ve been tempted to three-star a young adult novel just because the heroine sent burnt bacon down the disposal. Bad, bad, bad. Authors should never show teen readers such poor judgment without showing consequences. ) Washing the dishes before abandoning a house is absurd, Jim says. “But we’re going to do it anyway,” Trina firmly replies, and so they do, “washing, drying, and placing each plate, fork, pot and pan in its proper place.” Then they head out with the spang and click of arrowheads and wooden shafts glancing off their vehicles, driving past a “crazy-quilt patchwork of fused architecture,” burnt landscape littered with reeking dead bodies, skeletal frames of razed houses, until—well, see for yourself. It’s a long, perilous trek to Boise.
Nick and Trina hook up with an old friend who happens to study ancient civilizations and who happens to have escaped intact after a few weeks of lurking inside a ziggurat, where he happened to take notes in the invaders’ library. By now, I’m far too hooked to mind a few plot devices that demand lots of willing suspension of disbelief—and far too amused to mind if the scholar suspects that the apocalypse was triggered by my favorite scapegoat, the elusive Higgs Boson particle. In real life, the Chinese may or may not be experimenting with their own super collider, but in the novel, they’re the probable cause of that first seismic tremor.
What did they unleash? Well, the title is a bit of a giveaway. So is the title of Nancy Kress’ novella, “Yesterday’s Kin.” Both stories explore one of my most beloved premises, the “what if” divergences in Homo sapien’s family tree.
In short, “Reunion” is a fun, witty, genre-hopping, insightful and ultimately optimistic tale of humans surviving an enemy invasion. Never mind the sketchy science (“it isn’t magic, just manipulation of the current physical law paradigm”). Even for those who avoid military science fiction, I highly recommend it.
NOTE: This review was first published in Perihelion Science Fiction ezine in October 2014.
Never mind that the science is a little soft, the genre all over the map (“post-apocalyptic, science fiction action/adventure fantasy”)—“Reunion” is stellar, especially for military science fiction. I don’t even like military science fiction, but I love “Reunion.” Why? It’s the human component, namely a Portland cop, Nick Gates, who pulls me into his world even though it’s the last place I want to go as a reader. Battles, blood and mangled body parts? I’m outta here. Or I would be, if not for Nick.
Nick is on night duty when the apocalypse begins without a single warning peep from scientists or doomsday prophets. He narrates events as they unfold, and even though “unreliable narrator” is my favorite kind, Nick seems so reliable, honest and sensible, I trust him implicitly.
His sense of duty and fighting spirit and all the usual virtues aren’t what kept me turning pages. It’s the simple, methodical way he thinks. Just when I’ve had enough of the casualties in chapter one, Nick finds his way home, his house intact, his wife sleeping through the alien invasion. His dilemma: “Do I shake her awake and pour out the story of a twisted cityscape and untold deaths? Or would waking her only serve to ruin what might be the last decent night’s sleep of her life?”
Now that’s a man after my own heart.
But it gets even better. When looters smash plate-glass windows, Nick is conflicted: “I was relieved by this additional sign of survivors, but the cop in me was irked at such lawless, uncivilized behavior. I mean, sure, people needed the supplies. But did they need to break the windows?” At that point, there was no doubt I’d keep reading. Without any vandalism, Nick and Trina manage to loot a liquor store. “The end of the world was nothing to face sober,” after all.
Line after line, page after page, Nick fires off random thoughts that show us something that’s all too rare in fiction: a regular guy.
Science fiction fans, however, will want to know about the irregular stuff. There’s plenty of that. A brief shiver runs down the brick walls of a building; a window quivers; a row of Victorian houses appears “to have birthed a—what?” Nick wonders. “A pyramid? A ziggurat?” Burning houses illuminate a surreally altered Portland. Strange, new, but ancient looking buildings rise from the Earth, merging with whatever is in their way, from people to cars and skyscrapers. A man’s head and shoulders emerge from the roof of a car, “torso melded with the front seat,” and a cow is similarly fused, head and front legs protruding from the hood and front bumper.
In a later scene, Nick’s friend shows off the six-pointer he’d bagged. “Then the air sort of thickened, like it became water or something. It rippled. And then, where the man was standing, there was a stone wall ... The ends of antlers still poked out, and below them, the tip of (the guy’s) nose and shoes. One second he was alive,” Nick explains, “the next he was part of a wall. No time to scream, no time to think here it comes.”
Three-fourths of Earth’s population is killed in this sort of Salvador Dali scenario or by the invaders who come “trooping lockstep down the center of the street” in a column, “wide-bladed pole arms glinting above them, like the flickering points of light across a river’s ever shifting surface, their armor rippling like the scaled fish darting below. The front of the column begins peeling off left and right, like the mouth of a delta, each separate strand flowing into a house. Blood then puddles from beneath the doors and out each window.” The soldiers smash open doors, butchering helpless old men and women in their beds. It’s all “remarkably vivid, a lucid daydream.” Except that it’s a living nightmare.
Unlike “The Chaplain’s War” by Brad R. Torgersen (Baen Books), which pits Earthly humans against a very alien race with superior military capabilities, Lizzi’s alien invaders look suspiciously like human beings. Clad in weird armor, their spears “big, ungainly things like something out of a badly dubbed martial arts movie,” they take no prisoners. Fortunately, the bizarre army seems to have arrived with no idea what guns are and what bullets can do. Nick is quick to teach them.
Bullets don’t work on their high priests, however, so things get hot and ugly for whoever shoots at the unarmed, weirdly costumed elite. Nick, who’s been taking down spear-bearers with his service pistol, witnesses this just in the nick of time.
It’s a given that military fiction introduces us to great characters with memorable personalities only to show them die heroically. Don’t get too attached to anyone. Nick’s assorted forays into battle keep his wife on edge, along with readers, but we know he’ll survive. He has to. He’s narrating in first-person point of view. If I suspect an author might kill the protagonist, I’ll skip to the end and skip the book if our hero is doomed.
Even though Nick planted in my mind the same “little horror docudrama” that won’t stop running through the projector in his head, I kept turning pages. The story is excruciating. I hate battle scenes. Part of it is the furtive little fear, deep down, that I could one day face armed soldiers at my door. Shouldn’t I buy a gun and learn to shoot accurately? Nick’s ragtag warriors have no training in weaponry. “C’mon Trina,” one protests. “I read. I watch the History Channel.” Another man after my own heart.
Part of the story’s appeal is that Nick is so easy to identify with. “I never worried about leaving the world a better place,” he tells Trina. “I just wanted to make a good life for you and me, and maybe help a few people, get a few bad guys off the street. But now, if there is any hope left of making a good life for us, I need to try to change the world. Or at least a little part of it.” Nick’s everyman authenticity wins me over in scene after scene.
In spite of being Portlanders, Nick and Trina have the good sense of rural Midwesterners. (I’ve been tempted to three-star a young adult novel just because the heroine sent burnt bacon down the disposal. Bad, bad, bad. Authors should never show teen readers such poor judgment without showing consequences. ) Washing the dishes before abandoning a house is absurd, Jim says. “But we’re going to do it anyway,” Trina firmly replies, and so they do, “washing, drying, and placing each plate, fork, pot and pan in its proper place.” Then they head out with the spang and click of arrowheads and wooden shafts glancing off their vehicles, driving past a “crazy-quilt patchwork of fused architecture,” burnt landscape littered with reeking dead bodies, skeletal frames of razed houses, until—well, see for yourself. It’s a long, perilous trek to Boise.
Nick and Trina hook up with an old friend who happens to study ancient civilizations and who happens to have escaped intact after a few weeks of lurking inside a ziggurat, where he happened to take notes in the invaders’ library. By now, I’m far too hooked to mind a few plot devices that demand lots of willing suspension of disbelief—and far too amused to mind if the scholar suspects that the apocalypse was triggered by my favorite scapegoat, the elusive Higgs Boson particle. In real life, the Chinese may or may not be experimenting with their own super collider, but in the novel, they’re the probable cause of that first seismic tremor.
What did they unleash? Well, the title is a bit of a giveaway. So is the title of Nancy Kress’ novella, “Yesterday’s Kin.” Both stories explore one of my most beloved premises, the “what if” divergences in Homo sapien’s family tree.
In short, “Reunion” is a fun, witty, genre-hopping, insightful and ultimately optimistic tale of humans surviving an enemy invasion. Never mind the sketchy science (“it isn’t magic, just manipulation of the current physical law paradigm”). Even for those who avoid military science fiction, I highly recommend it.
NOTE: This review was first published in Perihelion Science Fiction ezine in October 2014.
January 8, 2015
Reunion is the first science fiction novel in a long time that actually surprised me with it's originality, it's action rhythm and a plot that surely captures your attention until the book is over.
I highly recommend this book if you like the gender and are looking for something as well written as it is fresh.
I highly recommend this book if you like the gender and are looking for something as well written as it is fresh.
June 26, 2015
The author grabs you right from the start; a cop waiting for his partner and then everything is changed...
Well written, I like his descriptive language and thoughts about what it means to be caught up in a situation life did not prepare you for.
I will look forward to more books from this author.
Well written, I like his descriptive language and thoughts about what it means to be caught up in a situation life did not prepare you for.
I will look forward to more books from this author.
June 19, 2014
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Reunion. It story kept me coming back for mire.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews