ELLANORA

In Meroving’s SF novel, when the rebel archangel Lucifer declares independence from the worlds allied with Paradise, a young mortal girl joins the ensuing fray.

In this faith-based novel, the author takes inspiration from The Urantia Book, which collects alleged messages from celestial beings delivered to a handful of people in Chicago across the first half of the 20th century. The apparent project of The Urantia Book is to retell Judeo-Christian religious narratives with the input of the spirit-beings while incorporating (as best the anonymous authors could) actual science, referencing distant planets and astrophysics—though it stops short of trendy 1970s paperback-peddling notions positing that God and angels are advanced aliens. This slim volume relates the ancient rebellion against heaven by the exalted archangel Lucifer (his full title: “the Lanonandek Son, the Sovereign of Satania, Lucifer Abaddon de Raphael”). Prideful arrogance drives him to make a declaration of independence against the Father (God) and sever relations with worlds allied to Paradise to form his own “Dominion,” with a powerful militia of “Guardians.” Lucifer’s arguments (and the threat of the Guardians) are enough to make 37 other planets join the rebellion, and thus divine civil war erupts, fought with spaceships and other advanced weaponry. Panoptia, a “Protocol 2: Level 5 inhabited world,” is a contested territory where young Ellanora Rose, a mortal girl, assumes the role of resistance fighter when Luciferians seize Panoptia’s resident “Custodian” as a hostage. With occasional narrative leaps ahead in years, many details of the struggle are elided, and the epic concludes in fewer than 100 pages. The positivity level is high, the character development is fitful at best, and the gadgets and gimmicks recall pulp SF of an earlier era. Other authors have mined ostensibly holy writ for their fiction (see Ben-Hur)—The Urantia Book is fair game, but this is flighty stuff at best.

A fast-paced, bantamweight space adventure heavily inspired by semi-occult lore.