A young man – a boy, really – is torn out of his world by forces he cannot understand and compelled to take on an improbable role as the only person who can save this civilization that is far beyond his understanding. The world on which David lands is, like Dune or Tattooine, a strange melding of desert tribes and off-planet advanced aliens, medieval societies armed at the same time with swords and air-scooters, marching robot dinosaur-like combat platforms and hand-to-hand battles with monsters, and of course the suicidal flight between anti-aircraft lasers to an impossibly rock-hard target that may or may not be the real focal point.

So, yes, we’ve seen much of this before, but the sci-fi realm is so richly populated with classics that it would be hard to write such a story that didn’t have elements borrowed from another. Larry Brown’s hero David Savakerrva is carried along by events but, unlike Forrest Gump, who is just an innocent abroad who happens to be a bystander in key events of his time, David rides on the coat-tails of a character that is probably unfamiliar to most US readers: Harry Flashman, the school bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George McDonald Frazier produced the monumental Flashman Papers series,  which offers often hilarious but extremely well-documented readings about the great doings of the British Empire and other key world events from about 1830 to 1890. The whole thing is a spoof follow-on to the original book. Flashman’s poltroonery earns him the distinction of sole survivorship in one disaster after another, which convey on him the image of continued heroic survival against impossible odds, as a result of he is deemed impossibly brave and is carried to higher and higher esteem in his society.

Thus it is with David, who is consistent only in his attempts to avoid facing up to the challenges, which are admittedly daunting given that he has none of the required experience, talents or interest. As he stumbles from one evasion of duty to another, failure and defeat are snatched away and replaced with victories, sometimes by accident, sometimes by  the intervention of others who are more clued into what is really going on. Eventually, of course, we reach the point at which evasion is no longer possible. Has he grown in character, skill and wisdom to the point that the nemesis can be defeated, or will he collapse in a puddle and let the bad guys win?

The fact that one can still ask this question tells you that Larry Brown has put enough wrinkles in his first book that the story does not simply plod on to the perfect endings of Dune or Star Wars. It leaves you the chance to do what all good thrillers do: make you stay up later than you had intended so you can finish the story and find out what happened. Bravo, Larry!

Having reviewed both the initial draft and the current as-published versions of this book [for which purpose I did receive complimentary copies], I have seen how fast Larry is bringing up his game as a thriller writer. As quickly as he is moving up the curve, I’m really looking forward to Volume 2. Meanwhile, if you haven’t gotten into Volume 1 yet, you should find it very enjoyable. You can get it on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2LmPTTK.