Quicker is the first book in series of optimistic near future SciFi/Thrillers. Its young heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation that’s made her reaction times faster than a normal human’s and turned her into an athletic phenom. With a faster, more efficient brain she’s a math prodigy who’s working on her own theory of quantum mechanics.Shy and concerned about her social skills, yet well loved by those around her, she’s recruited to the US gymnastic team. This puts her at the center of a terrorist plot at the Olympics. Those terrorists find themselves outclassed. A tradition of young, strong, brilliant, female heroines like Honor, Lisbeth, and Katniss is continued“Some of the best Sci-Fi I’ve read in years.”“…reminds me of Heinlein and Asimov…”Excerpt from a descriptive Amazon review:Why I Love Ell Donsaii:I have come to the conclusion that the answer to the question, the cause of my affection, is the mind of the author. He made a character that is smarter than smart and quicker than quick, stunning, kind, generous, creative and dangerous. What's not to like?But that isn't ultimately the reason.Science fiction and fantasy as genres permit an author to suspend some rules of man or nature and substitute ones more to his or her fancy. There are no limits that I can think of that say this far and no farther. But with this license comes a concomitant responsibility that must be fulfilled if the work is to have merit. The author must draw out the consequences of his/her hypotheses in ways that are both fascinating and credible.There are three basic elements to the game in the Donsaii novels. First, Ell has spectacular skills – greater than any other human, but still human. She is quick and strong and spectacularly coordinated, but bullets don't bounce off her and she doesn't leap tall buildings in a single bound. She is also stunningly beautiful, perky, humble, generous, patriotic, honorable, and tricky. She is also courageous, brilliant, kind, and doesn't take well to being bullied. Let me add a great manager, a can-do problem solver, self-reliant, creative, bold, and clumsy with boys. I could go on. That makes for story lines that are fun.The second element is the idea of a technology that makes high bandwidth instant communication possible over any distance, through any obstacle, unhackable and private.The third element, related to the second, is the idea of a technology that permits the instantaneous, though limited, transport of material, of stuff, through gates. Stick a stick into a gate here and it pops out of the matched gate over there. How far away? As far as you want, although you do have to move the receiving gate to your target by some means.These two bits of science magic are simple and easy to understand. They are imagined to derive from quantum entanglement by some hand waving about a 5th dimension, but that's ok with me. It's how the genre works. Both have a bearing on distance but really they are a step around the limits created by the speed of light which limit the speed at which causality can travel.What the author does with these ideas is where the good stuff starts to flow. Through the vehicle of Ell's stories he explores the intimate consequences in our lives of the speed of light boundary.
advertisement