Waking Prometheus

Waking Prometheus
by Paul L. Madden
(4/5 Stars)

This book--more of a novella than a novel--has nothing to do with the Prometheus movie from this year. There is an alien involved, but it's not an acid-dripping monster or some big pasty dude that flies around in a big croissant-shaped ship.

This story concerns one Brent Gallowes in the not-so-distant future. In the prologue Brent's nice suburban life is torn asunder when he finds his wife and child murdered in a mindless, random act of violence. After spending some time feeling sorry for himself, Brent decides to leave Earth and essentially become a space trucker.

When the story picks up in the "present" Brent is captain of a cargo freighter that spends its time going between Earth and various colonies and stations in the Solar System. His life is decidedly unglorious, much of his time spent boozing and still feeling sorry for himself. Brent and his crew find a damaged ship near Jupiter and decide to investigate. That's always a bad idea; just ask those people in Alien. Inside the human ship is essentially a big silver ball of unknown origin. But when Brent touches the thing, he learns there's an alien intelligence inside. From there Brent's life gets pretty complicated.

The alien intelligence claims it means no harm and only wants to go on its way. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very rich humans who would love to have an alien artifact like this to study. If Brent won't surrender the artifact, they might just take it from him. Mixed into all that is Brent's story of redemption through his decisions concerning the artifact. The pace moves pretty briskly as this is definitely on the low side of a novel-length story. It's not exactly hard science but it's not exactly a space opera either. It's a nice light sci-fi read that certainly won't take you very long to get through.

That is all.