Book - Time Heist (Firstborn Saga #1) by Anthony Vicino
We tried to kill ourselves. We had the weapons. We had the desire. Somehow, we failed. Humanity survived. Go figure.
They called it the Dissolution, but it's been a couple hundred years and if you ask around, nobody in Unity remembers what all the fuss was about. What everybody had been so willing to die for. Nobody cares.
I don't, at least. I've done my part. Worked Time Vice for the better part of twenty-years putting the bad guys into a Stream dream. Now I want out.
The numbers on my arm tell me I'll be dead soon. Less than a day left. I can live with that. What I can't live with is knowing a Unity Leader helped Malcolm Wolfe, the man who murdered my wife and a million other innocents, escape prison.
Finding Malcolm means uncovering secrets that could tear Unity apart from the inside. But if I don't stop him, there probably won't be a Unity to save anyhow.
Looks like we might get a chance to wipe ourselves out after-all. Now I just got to catch him before my numbers catch me.
I’m not sure that starting my review with some contradictions is the correct thing to do but they are my abiding memory of the book and they are brilliant, so bear with me. The whole story feels unique yet familiar. It is a fantastic story with characters you can't help but buy into, doing things within a world you’ve never seen but doesn’t leave you cold like some world-builders can do, as it feels very familiar, like you’ve read or seen it somewhere before, allowing you to jump straight into the love you will have for Time Heist without wasting any time working out what's going on or where you are. The narrative is punchy, modern and has a staccato feel that allows the pace to remain quite intense from first page to the last but, at the same time, has an almost old fashioned, elegant, and poetic structure that I don’t normally come across in modern science fiction and was a breath of fresh air to read.The narrative is also incredibly descriptive and yet describes nothing in detail, instead giving you just enough information that the cinema screen in your mind shows you the rest. It's like the author has written loads and yet nothing at all and has somehow tapped a vein in your own imagination and let your head write the book for him. None of that makes any sense at all does it? I really don’t know how to explain it. Many novels I’ve read have contradictory styles and emotions on a page, and they are all badly written and make the experience drag, but Anthony Vicino has seemingly found a little niche in style that works and works brilliantly.
They called it the Dissolution, but it's been a couple hundred years and if you ask around, nobody in Unity remembers what all the fuss was about. What everybody had been so willing to die for. Nobody cares.
I don't, at least. I've done my part. Worked Time Vice for the better part of twenty-years putting the bad guys into a Stream dream. Now I want out.
The numbers on my arm tell me I'll be dead soon. Less than a day left. I can live with that. What I can't live with is knowing a Unity Leader helped Malcolm Wolfe, the man who murdered my wife and a million other innocents, escape prison.
Finding Malcolm means uncovering secrets that could tear Unity apart from the inside. But if I don't stop him, there probably won't be a Unity to save anyhow.
Looks like we might get a chance to wipe ourselves out after-all. Now I just got to catch him before my numbers catch me.
I’m not sure that starting my review with some contradictions is the correct thing to do but they are my abiding memory of the book and they are brilliant, so bear with me. The whole story feels unique yet familiar. It is a fantastic story with characters you can't help but buy into, doing things within a world you’ve never seen but doesn’t leave you cold like some world-builders can do, as it feels very familiar, like you’ve read or seen it somewhere before, allowing you to jump straight into the love you will have for Time Heist without wasting any time working out what's going on or where you are. The narrative is punchy, modern and has a staccato feel that allows the pace to remain quite intense from first page to the last but, at the same time, has an almost old fashioned, elegant, and poetic structure that I don’t normally come across in modern science fiction and was a breath of fresh air to read.The narrative is also incredibly descriptive and yet describes nothing in detail, instead giving you just enough information that the cinema screen in your mind shows you the rest. It's like the author has written loads and yet nothing at all and has somehow tapped a vein in your own imagination and let your head write the book for him. None of that makes any sense at all does it? I really don’t know how to explain it. Many novels I’ve read have contradictory styles and emotions on a page, and they are all badly written and make the experience drag, but Anthony Vicino has seemingly found a little niche in style that works and works brilliantly.
Sci-fi wise everything is believable. The clock counting down to your own demise, the levels within the city are all fleshed out well and highly plausible and the criminal that is Malcolm Wolfe, whilst being quite obviously at the cutting edge of Vicino’s technology, has an old school, usually British and well spoken, characteristic that makes sense to the reader and I defy you to not start swapping Vicino’s Malcolm Wolfe for Malcolm McDowell in your head as you read. This is where the beauty of Vicino’s writing lies. It’s highly cinematic. You can picture Hollywood stars in the roles of the characters, you can imagine what each scene, each level, each ship, the prison and more all would look like on screen and, even once I had finished the novel, I was still auditioning directors in my head to make the Time Heist movie.
I think Time Heist has been the book that has led to writing more notes than ever before. Time Heist is the book that has excited every part of my brain all at once and yet never overwhelmingly so. Surprisingly Time Heist is self published by Anthony Vicino and not a famous author backed by a huge publishing house which is quite remarkable given how bloody good this novel is.
Buy it. Read it. Tell me I am wrong, I dare you.
Image/Synopsis - Amazon.
Anthony Vicino is on Twitter at @AnthonyVicino
Image/Synopsis - Amazon.
Anthony Vicino is on Twitter at @AnthonyVicino
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