Extinction Game
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Extinction Game is a riveting, action-packed post-apocalyptic survival story from master of SF, Gary Gibson. When your life is based on lies, how do you hunt down the truth? Jerry Beche should be dead. Instead, he's rescued from a desolate Earth where he was the last man alive. He's then trained for the toughest conditions imaginable and placed with a crack team of specialists on an isolated island. Every one of them is a survivor, as each withstood the violent ending of their own alternate Earth. And their new specialism? To retrieve weapons and data in missions to other apocalyptic versions of our world. But what is 'the Authority', the shadowy organization that rescued Beche and his fellow survivors? How does it access timelines to find other Earths? And why does it need these instruments of death? As Jerry struggles to obey his new masters, he begins to distrust his new companions. A strange bunch, their motivations are less than clear, and accidents start plaguing their missions. Jerry suspects the Authority is feeding them lies, and team members are spying on him. As a dangerous situation spirals into catastrophe, is there anybody he can trust?
Series
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2 primary books#1 in The Apocalypse Duology
The Apocalypse Duology is a 2-book series with 2 released primary works first released in 2014 with contributions by Gary Gibson.
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As a fan of Gary Gibson's previous series, the Shoal Sequence, I was excited to get a chance to read this first volume in his new universe. Or multiverse, I guess. Jerry Beche, hero and protagonist, is the last man alive on Earth. A devastating man made plague has wiped out the rest of the human race, or so Jerry thinks until he comes across footprints near his snow bound cottage. While he may be the last human on Earth, he isn't alone. Rescued and taken to an Earth not quite like his own, he is recruited into the Pathfinders. The Pathfinders, a group of explorers from other destroyed Earth, work for the Authority to help explore the parallel worlds. There is some hint to the bigger picture of the multiverse, of braids and strands of possibility.
If this is beginning to sound like an episode of Sliders, I'd agree. Using jump platforms and timed returns, our crew of Pathfinders slips from world to world. When Gibson shines in this novel, he shimmers. The imagined worlds - and their destruction - are each glimpses into Earths that we ourselves might face. Each apocalypse we face in Extinction Game is well thought out and described.
Unfortunately, I found the secondary characters to be somewhat lacking in development. The antagonist and supporting cast were hollow sketches for the most part. The result was a somewhat uneven experience. Between well thought out extinction events and the sometimes cardboard characters that catalog them, there was just enough story to keep moving forward. Recommended as a mashup of Sliders and Doomsday B movies, it just needed a little more than it delivered to wow me.
Special thanks to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for making this ARC available to me prior to US publication.
