He Ain't Heavy...

"Remember this: your problems will never be solved by moving backwards." Truth.

23.12 The Shield

In the interest of full disclosure, my brother is the author of this book. In other news, he is a fucking writer!  I felt extreme pride reading the words that he has worked so hard on, but my pride soared above and beyond when I realized he had succeeded in creating an alternate history that is not only viable, but is interesting and outrageously fun to read about.

The Shield are a group of elite bodyguards meant to protect the few men who now lead a world based on peaceful co-existence. A world meant to be free of violence but educated enough to know the impossibility of that ideal. The Shield are trained to find threats and dispose of them. An unidentified alien ship is heading towards Europa and the Prime Minister heads out to great it.  Safe to say, The Shields are put to work! It’s like Jack Reecher in space people!

Growing up, Peter was in to karate, flying, and war strategy games. He created his own game with all sorts of weapon cards and a huge playing board. He played a flight simulator game on our old Mac at least a million times (I can still hear the f-ing music!) He has been in to this stuff his whole life and I recognized all of that knowledge in his writing. This is a new world with a totally different military, weapons, and ships. There are military outposts, space ships, fighter planes, flight suits, body armor, guns, and all sorts of other gadgets; all described in detail, and in a bit of a nerdy way (but in a wonderfully nerdy and enthusiastic way!) This is not new science fiction terrain, but every time I made an assumption about where the plot was headed, I was wrong.  Also, he manages to describe a whole new world, its history and functionality, while maintaining a taught and compulsively readable action story. I had a hard time putting it down at night, and dreamt of alien invaders once I did.

Truth is, I can't wait to get my mitts on the next part.  You would think my being family would get me somewhere, but noooooo...  Ever the little sister.  A very proud little sister.