Sam Batterman's "Maximal Reserve"

Almost two years ago, I read an extraordinary techno-thriller called Wayback by Sam Batterman. In the novel, scientists had discovered a way to return to the time immediately prior to Noah’s ark. Fast-paced, full of science and action-packed. It reminded me of the novels of the late Michael Crichton. At the time, I wondered what kind of story could Batterman write that would equal Wayback.

With Maximal Reserve, he did it.

Phil Channing is a brand new college graduate who lands a job in Texas (his girlfriend’s hometown) with Axcess Energy’s Exploration Division. He’s been taken on a tour of an exploration project off the Atlantic coast of Africa, where there’s evidence of a large oil field, but of a very different kind – a field that will prove that petroleum originates from deep within the earth. The shallowest access to the field lies under the state of – Israel. It could transform Israel into a larger oil producer than Saudi Arabia , changing the geopolitics of the Middle East and the world.

Into this potentially explosive situation is added corrupt U.S. politicians, the Russian mafia, the Syrians seeking to strike a blow against Israel, an increasingly unbalanced scientist, Israel’s secret service Mossad – and a love story. It’s a lot to manage, and the author pulls it off.

Maximal Reserve is almost breathtaking to read, moving so fast that it’s hard to put down. Batterman takes the reader on a wild ride, with lots of bodies strewn along the way, abd ends in a cliffhanger beneath the desert floor near the Dead Sea.

The novel is full of scientific detail but it doesn’t overpower the story. It also explores what’s called “abiogenic theory” of the origin of petroleum, and then moves the theory into a credible fictional rendering. The novel’s bibliography of the science and theory behind it testify to the depth of research.

Well done, Mr. Batterman. So, what’s next?

Thursday, Pleasantly Disturbed

It’s time for another edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the totally fearless Marty Duane Scott, who, oddly enough, has been off sitting in some chair lately (or, more precisely, not sitting in a chair).

Most of my family and friends would tell you that I am not the outdoorsman type. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish (my father hated fishing so we never went). I do remember camping – I believe it was right after I graduated from high school. I do like to hike and bike (a rhyme!), but I’m not one for an extended stay in the wilderness or woods. Say, longer than three or four hours.

So I’m surprised that I’ve enjoyed reading Cynthia Ruchti’s They Almost Always Come Home. Virtually the entire novel is set in the Canadian wilderness, where bathrooms are holes behind logs and you can take a bath in the stream or lake. It’s a story about a husband who disappears on a solo trip in the wilderness, and his father, his wife and her best friend go looking for him. It’s a great story, and I’m hoping to have the review posted tomorrow.

My current reading is Sam Batterman’s new novel Maximal Reserve. His first novel, Wayback, is a great read, and this one is turning out to be just as good if not better. I’m amazed at the science and technology details he uses in his books – and how he doesn’t choke you with them. I can barely put the book down.

Late last year, I read The Apple Trees at Olema, a new book of poetry by Robert Hass. Hass has some considerable standing the poetry community. He’s won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, among a lot of other awards. He’s helped Czeslaw Milosz translate numerous volumes of poetry from the Czech. He is a name.

I liked it, although I have a tendency to get uncomfortable when profanity is used a lot, which it was in a few of the poems. But Hass is a great storyteller in his poems, and there were many fine ones and lots of good ones, and overall the collection is well worth one’s time (and money). Just as I finished, the new issue of Poetry arrived. Included it in was a scathing review of the Hass book. And I mean scathing. It was so ugly that I wondered if I had read an entirely different book. The next issue of Poetry contained a number of letters attacking the reviewer. And then the following issue had a letter attacking the attackers.

Yawn.

I stopped reading at that point. So a little literary controversy spices things up. But whatever else you want to call it, cruelty is ugly. So is meanness, especially when it’s cloaked in literary criticism.

On a happier note, plans are well underway for my grandson’s first birthday next month. Yes, he will be one year old. He was a late crawler (he could crawl backward just fine), but learn to crawl he did, and the next day crawled up the stairs in our house (supervised). We’re all battening down the hatches.

To see more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, please visit Helen over at Random Musings. Marty Duane Scott is either on vacation or still trying to sit in that chair.

Photograph: Cameron and his dad Travis by his mother Stephanie. Swiped shamelessly off of Facebook. Oh, wait, I mean used with permission.

The Tenth Day of Christmas: Suspense

I’ve loved reading mysteries and suspense since I was six or seven years old. The first one I can remember reading was Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. I can also remember ordering ever mystery offered by Scholastic Book Service at school, inhaling all of the Hardy Boys (with a slight detour into the Tom Swift science fiction stories), and then going on to mysteries with murders and general mayhem. Even today, I usually can’t resist the newest mystery novel by Elizabeth George, P.D. James, Ian Rankin or the Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte (English translation).

Christian fiction has its own sub-genre of mystery and suspense, and a growing category of horror. And there’s a lot of controversy within the ranks, so to speak; not everyone likes it or believes it to be “edifying.” But I’ve found four novelists are who tell great stories, and I will read anything by them.

Earlier this year, not too long before I started blogging, I discovered Mike Dellosso and his novel The Hunted, shortly before he published his latest novel, Scream. Set in Pennsylvania where Mike lives, these are stories more influenced by Stephen King than P.D. James. There’s mystery, to be sure, but there’s also horror, and sometimes the supernatural. He writes about life in a small-town, but it’s life like you’ve never run across before. I got hooked. His next novel, Darlington Woods, is due out in May 2010.

Then I saw a recommendation for Isolation by a Chicago-based novelist named Travis Thrasher. He’s a full-time writer, and has written 12 novels, including a love story and a lot of mysteries and suspense. His novel Sky Blue is a personal favorite, and I’ve also read Admission and Ghostwriter. Some are mysteries, all are suspenseful and a few fall into the horror category (As I read Isolation, I had to occasionally put it down, go walk around and calm myself, and then come back – the tension that Thrasher creates is something else). He’s under contract for a series of Young Adult novels, and has just self-published Every Breath You Take because it was something he wanted to do. (Yes, I’ve ordered it.)

Adam Blumer's novel Fatal Illusions was published in the late spring, and I don’t think I will ever look at magicians the same way again. Adam is a freelance editor who lives in Michigan’s U.P., and this is his first novel – and it’s a corker of a story about a family trying to take a healing sabbatical, and instead finding themselves being stalked but not one but two different people for two different reasons. Don’t read this novel before turning the lights out for the night; I made that mistake and lay in bed wide-eyed for some time. Adam is also working on his next novel.

Sam Batterman also published his first novel this year, called Wayback. It leans more in the direction of science fiction than the other three novelists, and it’s more like Michael Crichton than Stephen King. It’s got a fascinating premise – that scientists are able to prove the Biblical flood, and travel back in time to do just that. The descriptions of the landscape – and of the cataclysm of the flood itself – are incredible. Batterman is working on a sequel to WayBack.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

Sam Batterman's "Wayback"

I finished reading Sam Batterman's Wayback, and I've posted the review at Amazon (may take a while before it's visible, though; Amazon publishes reviews anywhere from immediately to 48 hours later). It's a great story about a "what if" -- what if the Biblical account of creation and the flood found in the book of Genesis were true -- and scientists had the means to verify it?

Batterman mixes science, action, history, a little romance -- and serves up one powerful story.

What impressed me the most, though, was his ability to describe settings -- the landscape. I was in that control center where the scientists have congregated. I was seeing the antedeluvian world for the first time, feeling and inhaling the water-saturated atmosphere and shocked, like the characters, at seeing herds of dinosaurs. I was walking the streets of Jersualem right before the Six-Day Way begins in 1967. I was running with the crew down the streets and into the sewer of the ancient city that doesn't know it's doomed. The detail is amazing, representing some exhaustive research. In the case of the antedeluvian world, the descriptions and detail are speculative but no less real.

Batterman, in his first novel, is clearly a master of setting of the scene.

Going "Wayback"

Thirty years ago, I went through a science fiction phase in my reading. I believe it started with Frank Herbert's Dune series; by the time the phase ended, I had devoured Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Arthur Clarke, Orson Scott Card, Ben Bova and scores of others, all of them great storytellers. Previously, the closest I had come to science fiction was Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, other best sellers, and then the mega-hit (and mega-movie) Jurassic Park.

There was a gap for me between Terminal Man and Jurassic Park -- I was on to other genres. But what always impressed me about Crichton was his ability to embrace science in his novels, and make the speculative totally believable.

I'm almost finished the novel Wayback by Sam Batterman, and I may have found another Michael Crichton.

Wayback is about an idea -- the idea that scientists have figured out a way to travel back in time, and a team goes to a time shortly before the Great Flood of Genesis. The scientists on the team represent the gamut of belief -- from ardent Christians to atheists. They don't know that Middle Eastern terrorists are right behind them, terrorists who are not interested in scientific knowledge but something sinister.

It sounds implausible. It sounds like believability will be a problem. But you start reading the novel and wham!, it's got you. Sam Batterman has that same ability to utilize science and speculative science that Michael Crichton had. The breadth of the research he's undertaken for the novel is extraordinary. And the novel does what good speculative novels have to do -- suck you into the story and move fast. You find yourself exploring the world of Noah with all the wonder of the novel's fictional scientific team.

I'll have a more in-depth review, but I can say right now that Wayback is a terrific, and thought-provoking, read.