Review of Exit Pursued by a Bee

[Chriskander]

I have done a number of reviews over the years, and would like to publicize those available as inexpensive e-Books. How about it -- Mobile Readers -- take a look at the books that started the movement.


Exit – Pursued by a Bee, by Geoff Nelder.
Double Dragon Publishing Inc
e-Book – all formats – $5.99
ISBN 9781554045945 $14.99

The protagonist team of this on-and-off-Earth romp are three NASA astronauts, Kallandra the space vehicle test pilot, Derek the spacecraft designer, her fiancé, and Claude the geophysicist and third character in the relationship tangle. They struggle to correct the problems caused by the eruption from underground of a number of mysterious spheres, that may have been there for two billion years – as well as those of the xenophobic actions of a group of loose cannon military officials who want to blast everything with nukes.

The novel is somewhat of a reverse intrusion fantasy, in that the spheres have been here longer than we have and their action is to leave Earth, not invade it. Be that as it may, the action is squarely within genre as our team use their inside NASA contacts to uncover the nature of the spheres and what their intentions are. The spheres seem to control and distort time, no longer linear (if it ever was) and now subject to random decoherences. The action leads from the chaos caused by the first sphere as it rises from under Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, to various NASA sites, to the next sphere under El Capitan in Yosemite N.P., and to a two person space pursuit of the departing spheres.

Along the way we meet Tabitha, the unscrupulous and irrepressible journalist who wheedles her way into the investigation in order to sell her stories to ever more prestigious papers, Derek’s awkward nephew Blake, and Oqmar the hen-pecked neolithic farmer and his dog Kur who have also tangled with the spheres in an earlier time.

Who are the antagonists in the story, the enigmatic spheres or the generals who wish to destroy them? Who is right – are they a threat with their ability to manipulate time and cause massive earth movements or have they been preventing these time decoherences for millions of years?
What happens to our heroes and the poor Earth wracked by timequakes? Author Nelder keeps us guessing until the end.

Did you just notice a funny snippet of a memory that doesn’t belong in this time stream? Maybe the spheres are on the move again.