Dangerous Experiments

Archeons #2

by James L. Steele

The survivors of the planet Rel are not alone after all. Rel’s other two Archeons, Rive and Friend, are still alive.

Rive’s fox has been pondering the nature of time and motion. He has figured out how to open portals outside the universe, and he is unable to control these new spheres as they grow, swallowing planets and entire civilizations. He is spreading destruction everywhere he goes, and he can’t stop.

Deka and Kylac are the only two who dare chase them, evacuating the survivors along the way, hoping to catch up and put an end to the destruction before more lives are lost, and hopefully before Deka’s mate dies again.

Joining them on the journey is Stephen, a man from Earth who yearns to see what’s beyond his planet. The people he meets will change his life forever, and perhaps his entire species.

Or so he hopes.

298 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 10, 2019

About the author

James L. Steele has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including: Solarcide, Allasso, Different Worlds, Different Skins: V.2, Tall Tales with Short Cocks V.2, Bourbon Penn, Gods with Fur, Claw the Way to Victory, and Fictionvale.

The Archeons series, his sci-fi novels featuring nonhuman characters, is published through KTM Publishing.

He lives in Ohio, where he pursues his hobby of becoming a wine connoisseur while having between two and six existential crises per day.

Blog: https://daydreamingintext.blogspot.com/

Reviews

[Frank LeRenard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, like the first, was also interesting to me, though there were some aspects of it that made it a less enjoyable. The stakes in it are enormously high; so high that after a while of witnessing their consequences, they began to feel routine. Partly this may be because the structure here is very similar to that of the first book, with the protagonists going from planet to planet on various rescue missions. It's more directed this time--they're following a trail, looking for the cause of the destruction in order to stop it--but this does little to offset the repetitive nature of things. Once again, for me it was carried mainly by the creativity of the various settings.

I suspect the human character of Stephen might garner a wide range of reactions. He was introduced in the first book, in a fun little aside on planet Earth, but here he has become one of the main crew, and full chapters are devoted to his point of view. I struggled to understand the purpose of his inclusion, myself. Perhaps he might be there for some added groundedness, finally allowing the reader, who is most likely human, to see these places from a more relatable point of view. Perhaps he might be there to allow the book's protagonists to lecture us, the human reader, about our doomed society (which here is attributed entirely to our not having a "companion species", another equally sapient species we share our planet with, which I admit strikes me as a gross oversimplification despite what the two Archaeons claim). Perhaps this character has elements of author-insertion. Perhaps it's all of these, in part or in whole. But the character did not speak to me, and I mostly found his presence intrusive and often annoying, with his hard-headedness and sometimes wild reactions to systems of life he wasn't accustomed to or which perturbed him in some way. This was a stark contrast to Kylac and Deka, the other two protagonists, who manage to find beauty in just about everything--a much more pleasant point of view to linger on, in my opinion.

The plot is setting up some big mysteries this time, though, with this concept of a medium outside of the universe, time travel, time loops, and so on. So there is plenty here still to latch on to even if, like with me, Stephen doesn't work for you. But I do wonder just how much more things can escalate from here before the plot dives into the realm of absurdity.