THE GOLDEN DILEMMA

A husband and wife already shaken by a worldwide seismic disaster find themselves abducted and exploited by a cruel alien empire in Lamar and Liana Golden’s SF novel.

Married couple Greg and Carla have their lives (along with their city) overturned in a global earthquake; Greg learns to survive and protect Carla in the broken, anarchic landscape. In a flash of light, they are transported to a distant world. Seized by sadistic soldiers (assisted by advanced humanoid “android” robots), Carla is repeatedly degraded and sexually violated in front of Greg, who is himself brutalized and enslaved. Their captors are from a vast empire waging war throughout the universe—the aliens are sterile and abduct victims from various planets to forcibly impregnate the females and then raise the male offspring as fresh troops. Carla becomes an unwilling breeder as an outraged Greg conspires with fellow slaves to learn the enemy’s technology in the hope of staging a revolt. The authors are a father-daughter team who have previously collaborated on child-friendly material such as Rika Saves a Cat (2023). Now, after penning some crime thrillers solo, Lamar Golden reteams with Liana Golden in this SF military-combat yarn, which falls on the grownup side of the ledger—though the grueling sexual violence at the outset thankfully yields to more generalized guerilla skirmishes and battles that are often related with journalistic detachment and generalizations (“The enemy pushed forward, closing the gap, but Greg’s team was well-coordinated, each move calculated to buy them more time”). The alien environments are not terribly exotic, and the nameless, all-powerful space conquerors are a thoroughly vile but otherwise nondescript bunch (one yearns for the pulpy color of, say, the troll-like Psychlos from L. Ron Hubbard’s superficially similar 1982 novel Battlefield Earth) who prove surprisingly vulnerable to ragtag resistance and DIY sabotage. A cliffhanger finale points straight to a sequel.

An undemanding human-versus-alien yarn with jarring elements of sexual assault.