EXERTIONS OF BETTER MEN

In Venenga’s SF series starter, a suicidal widower in 2009 leaps into a Colorado waterfall only to emerge hundreds of years later in a troubled post–World War III America.

Nicholas Smith is an academic in emotional agony after the death of his cherished, newly pregnant wife, Amy, during her military service. He attempts to end his own life by jumping into a Denver-area waterfall near where he and Amy first met. Inexplicably, the widower finds himself very much alive and being roughly handled and tormented by a group of brutal inquisitors led by a fiendish cleric-type called Gabriel. It appears that Smith has teleported 1,000 years into the future. A third world war laid waste to the entire Earth, but in North America there arose a powerful and vicious band of religious fanatics, the Righteous, who have spread an empire throughout what used to be the United States. They threaten Smith with execution for his blasphemous action of violating the waterfall, which turns out to be some sort of Righteous sacred site. However, a squad of the Sovereign Brotherhood comes to his rescue—a ragtag resistance movement that pits itself against the Righteous. Nicholas’ new saviors largely embrace him in fellowship, and the hero comes to realize that he has fulfilled their prophecy about the coming of a warrior who will prove decisive in an ongoing battle. But one of the problems Nicholas now faces is that the meaning of the victory implied in the prophecy is open to interpretation.

First-time author Venenga opens this SF/fantasy series with a book that’s refreshingly Hobbit-brief, honing the adventure in the manner of the best of vintage pulps and making every word and chapter matter rather than bloating things to a genre-fashionable, fully annotated page count. The dystopian retro-future that she conjures, though, is appreciably less detailed than, say, Middle-Earth, and the setting raises a lot of questions before the finale (which leaves things on quite a cliffhanger). It is taken for granted, for instance, that the post-nuclear, post–WWIII culture here has somehow neglected or willfully forgotten how to develop weapons. Swords, knives, and bows and arrows constitute the bulk of the Righteous’ and the Sovereign Brotherhood’s armaments—that is, until Nicholas dazzles everybody with his supposed innovation: the trebuchet catapult. That said, flying machines, remote-controlled automatons, and even advanced biomechanical technology also exist, which will require a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of readers; hopefully, a real corker of an explanation awaits in later books in the series. Readers should also be advised that, despite their supposed religious zealotry, the Righteous are a rather vaguely defined, nondenominational bunch of bullies claiming divine inspiration; they certainly aren’t clearly representative of any particular creed, philosophy, or sect. A web of prophecy threads through the latter part of the book and brings up a fate-versus–free will argument, but it remains underdeveloped at this early stage of the game.

A trim but solid time-tripping tale that genre fans will likely appreciate.