Kepler’s Son by Geoff Nelder.
Book 3: The Flying Crooked Series.
Mother and father are true humans born on Earth. Their son was conceived with the unwanted help from alien genes and so Gaston while loving him, refers to Adah as more Kepler’s son than his.
The hybrid Adah walked over and hugged his very human mother, who eagerly wrapped her arms around him even though she wasn’t keen on his sweaty-socks pungency. Weird considering, he didn’t wear socks. No one did.
The humans and their offspring (including clones and GM people) in the Kepler system face a backlash from Purist keps who want all humankind to be extinguished. With the support of the kep elite and strange artificial intelligence machines, our plucky band of humans find themselves hiding in the most extraordinary places such as inside a sun, but is it enough to thwart danger?
5-Stars: Adah Is Different In Most Respects From Human Boys.
‘Kepler’s Son’ in ‘The Flying Crooked’ series by Geoff Nelder is finally here. Let’s recap.
In ‘Suppose We’ (book one) a spaceship crash-lands on a faraway planet but the natives are so far ahead of Earth they ignore the human crew.
In ‘Falling Up’ (book two) Em is captured by an alien artificial intelligence that had attacked the Kepler-20h system.
Now in ‘Kepler’s Son’ (book three) our heroes’ ace trick of splicing human genes with nasty bacteria to help the natives has backfired leaving the planet in danger of being overrun by squidgy, rapidly-evolving mind-hive creatures.
The Artificial Intelligence CAN reports after arranging with Kep flitters to reprogram all the ‘essential’ communication and science satellites that danced in whirls and lurches after being deserted by their home Kepler-20h planet. Problem: none of the 125 satellites have sufficient fuel to travel far. Solution: We’ve cannibalised some to create a huge solar cell array to supplement slow but steady ion drives to make their way. Where to? We didn’t know for days, but perturbations in the inner-planet orbits revealed the probable location and I found a weak signal from a beacon. Streaming now to update and sync. Bad news: intense radiation needs guarding against. Date: Earth February 19th 3664 Kepler New 6976 days.
A census is conducted by me because none counts better than I. All data refer to beings on this planet Kepler-20h. All beings possess a biometric signature whether they know it or not.
- Indigenous population known to humans as keps: 137, 328 (data from their archives indicate a mass migration to other planets 21 years ago).
- Indigenous population known to humans as trogs: 2,675,177 (NB very few live on the surface).
- Humans from Earth: 2 (Science Officer Gaston Poirier, Navigator Em Farrer).
- Human-forms with tripartite genetic code: 1 (Adah with DNA from two humans and one kep).
- Human-forms with pure human DNA via cloning engineering using original crew members plus genetic material brought from Earth: 217.
- Keeps – engineered human plus indigenous bacteria: 2,538,824.
In Chapter Twenty-Seven: Em was always the one who put herself out, travelling for days over unknown landscapes with only Kep1 and a trio of flitters for company just to hug her son. Gaston wasn’t Adah’s father, at least not in the traditional sense. The kep biologists had sampled his DNA and explained how most of it was human and some from the kep rapist and it’s the latter that had made him so different in most respects from human boys. His translucent skin; telepathic abilities the limitations of which he’d yet to discover except that it only worked with keps and keeps; and his ability to solidify his imaginary friends. Very scary and completely mysterious. At least his mother and father—the Gaston fraction—were now safe on the kep’s secret corona station. Hiding it inside a sun.
I enjoyed reading ‘Kepler’s Son’ and I invite you to read ‘The Flying Crooked’ series. Author Geoff Nelder takes his readers on a spectacular 5-Star Science Fiction (Action and Adventure). You will want to catch up before ‘Vanished Earth’ (book four) arrives. What’s happened to the humans’ home planet? Assuming Earth is our home planet. In book 4 of the Flying Crooked series of hard science fiction novellas, we find Earth, or so we think, but like the butterfly it’s changed.
Geoff Nelder lives in rural England within an easy cycle ride of the Welsh mountains. Publications include several non-fiction books on climate reflecting his other persona as a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society; over 90 published short stories in various magazines and anthologies; thriller, humour, science fiction, and fantasy novels.
Editorial Review and Endorsement by Book Marketing Global Network.
Review by Magdalena Ball: 5.0 out of 5 Stars. Hugely fun, fast-paced, inventive, action-oriented sci-fi. Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2023. You don’t need to read Geoff Nelder’s bio to know that he is inherently a scientist and a teacher. His books are engaging and inventive to be sure, but they are underpinned by a deep understanding of and delight in the wonders of physics and biology. His worlds are full of anomalies that draw on real-life quantum quirks, cosmic paradoxes and biological anomalies, and his aliens are both delightfully bizarre and yet somehow plausible. He is a writer who knows his sci-fi tropes well enough to twist them into a Möbius strip and take them to new places while still providing plenty of Easter eggs to keen readers of the genre.
Kepler’s Son, the third book in his Flying Crooked series, is no exception. In previous books in the series, humans have left the Earth and crash-landed on a planet called Kepler-20h where the aliens are so technologically advanced to humans, that they just ignore the visitors. Humans aren’t colonisers here, as is often the case in sci fi books, but minor vermin barely worthy of note. It is only the awkward human personality, human bacterial issues, and the ship-steering, all seeing, God-like artificial intelligence CAN that makes the humans noteworthy to the Keps – the ultra-advanced aliens who live on Kepler-20. CAN shines in this work as a hilarious non-human character with its camp dairy style missives that play on its name (“Can Can”, “cannibalised”, “cantering”, “Wiccan” “the oilcan”, etc.). CAN is a significant character, whose distinctive voice is somewhere between the existential musings of The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy’s Marvin (though happier) and the careful diction of a geeky science teacher.
The other protagonists of the series are Em and the charmingly French Gaston. In book two, Em falls pregnant to Gaston at the same time as she is impregnated by a Kep, thereby creating a hybrid child, Adeh. Adeh is 18 when Kepler’s Son, an obvious reference to Adeh, opens. His interesting mix of human and alien genes are on full display throughout the book as he develops while exploring the world he and his parents live on, and learning the limits of his capabilities and his relationship to other creatures, imaginary or real.
Nelder does a good job of keeping the story fast-paced and action-oriented as the humans and their collaborators are hunted down by ‘purist’ Keps who would like to exterminate them. While the story hints at human history and our many foibles including the wrecking of our planet through anthropogenic climate change, the way in which the narrative progresses is novel, involving a galactic chase that includes ‘pinching’ – a folding of space time that simulates a kind of wormhole. There are all sorts of dangers for the couple as they fly a variety of crafts, and fun hiding spaces like a base inside a sun’s corona or an impossible tower built of ‘non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, non-Einstein geo-physics’. Nelder manages just the right blend of scientific description and imaginative ideation. The characterisation remains strong through the book as he moves in and out of different viewpoints, even giving voice to some of the stranger characters, like the genetically-engineered Keeps – part Kep, part human, but more collective than individual and only able to communicate in sing-song grunts.
While Kepler’s Son does provide context and background to the previous books, both in the intro and at key points through the narrative, a better reading experience is to be had by reading all three books in the series (and ultimately the fourth when it comes out) in sequence as it does take a bit of catching up to understand Nelder’s extensive universe with its biological and mechanical creatures, particularly Gaston’s Papillon who feels quite important but doesn’t feature strongly in Kepler’s Son. That said, Kepler’s Son is self-contained enough to provide a joyride that won’t disappoint readers who enjoy high quality sci-fi. This is a well-crafted book with a dynamic and engaging pace that has something for everyone, including multiple close calls, close and steamy encounters, clones, cold fusion, dreamlike landscapes, and far-flung star systems.
Product Details:
Paperback: 201 Pages
Publisher: LL-Publications (November 22, 2022)
Language: English
Science Fiction (Action and Adventure)
Science Fiction (Alien Invasion)
Science Fiction (First Contact)
Science Fiction (Medical Fiction)
Science Fiction (Post-Apocalyptic)
Science Fiction (Space Exploration)
Author’s Page At Book Marketing Global Network:
https://bookmarketingglobalnetwork.com/book-marketing-global-network/author-geoff-nelder/
