John Patrick Kennedy’s “I Am Titanium” is a message novel in the tradition of Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” But unlike Heinlein’s Christ-like figure, Kennedy’s main character is Pax, a teenage boy with a broken, dying body and an ability to access the astral plane. Pax also is the pet project of a non-physical being nicknamed Terry (aka Terkun’shuks’pai) who believes humans and the planet Earth are worth saving despite an abundance of evidence suggesting otherwise. Not every being on the astral plane agrees with Terry, including Lana, who is coopted by Terry to interact with Scarlett, the traditional outsider high school girl. Scarlett is in love with Pax.
When Pax becomes an astral being, Scarlett follows him, albeit accidently. Suddenly, they have more powers than all superheroes combined. The problem is that they cannot control the powers and each of them wrecks havoc, leaving behind a body count that is the envy of any Hollywood summer action movie franchise. In short, think “Bonnie and Clyde” meets “Alien” meets “Avatar.”
The real villains in Kennedy’s novel are black tentacles - “a symbiotic or parasitical negative energy species.” Unlike the creature in the “Alien” film trilogy, these tentacles are harder for the good guys to destroy and harder for the reader to believe in. Pax and Scarlett, all humans for that matter, are pawns of these non-physical beings, the good force versus the bad force – like the gods of Mount Olympus battling for control of the universe.
The dialogue can be pretty thick: “The destructiveness of the primary intelligent species, combined with its lack of production of secondary and tertiary intelligences …”, but the action never ends, the philosophy is hard to disagree with, and Pax and Scarlett are imaginative characters. Some readers will love the book, others not so much.