Insights

Kon-Tiki Quartet #3

by Eric Brown, Keith Brooke

On the colony world of Newhaven, biologist Travis Denholme has refined the drug by which the planet's alien species achieve telepathic contact. He has the means of bringing telepathy to the human race, and faces the dilemma of whether to make his discovery public knowledge and risk changing everything. But before he and psychiatrist Kat Manning can decide on a way forward, an assassin attempts to kill them. As they flee for their lives, they must find out not only why they are being targeted by a ruthless killer, but why someone is trying to eradicate the planet's largest lifeform, the geosaurs.

The third novella in the Kon-Tiki Quartet is a thrilling action-adventure featuring aliens, telepathy, identity downloads and a ruthless faction determined to eliminate anyone who stands in their way.

Genres: Science Fiction

196 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2019

About the author

Eric Brown was a British science fiction author and Guardian critic.

Reviews

[Karl]

This signed and numbered hardcover edition is copy 41 of 100 issued thus, and is signed by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several years on from Parasites, the second in Brown and Brooke’s Kon-Tiki quartet, Kat Manning and Travis Denholme have not revealed the secret of how Daniel DeVries died, nor of Travis’s discovery of the neurotransmitter the geosaurs on the planet of Newhaven produce from their symbiosis with their marmoset companions. This can allow telepathy at short range and for a short period and was instrumental in the circumstances of DeVries’s death. Ever since then, Kat and Travis have been working clandestinely together, he to synthesise the transmitter, she to work out the effects such a drug may have on the attitudes and behaviour of the human population.

Kat arranges a meeting where they can thrash out their problems but it is forestalled when Travis is shot by a stranger. Before the hit can be finished off a man called Meyers saves Travis by wrestling with his attacker, who is seriously injured. Something about the two is odd, there is a new, fresh quality to their skin and a recognisable aspect to their behaviours.

This incident plunges the pair into a plot involving the printing technology which allowed the present colonists to be produced on Newhaven and the question of whether or not the deep-frozen passengers on the Kon-Tiki ought to be resurrected, mixed in with a political dilemma about the direction the colony ought to take - and one reprinted man’s megalomania.

It’s unfortunate that the constraints of the series - plot has to be incorporated into each instalment - do not quite allow a fuller exploration of the implications for the characters of the printing technology. Though it is touched on, how it would feel to have memories of a marriage that the other person involved does not, the dynamics of that skewed relationship are somewhat lost.

Both Brown and Brooke, individually and collectively, are never less than readable though.