Earth Sink

Earth Sink is a science fiction apocalyptic vision by Ilyan Lavanway.

War has broken out on the planet of Antecedeon, a seemingly perfect alien world where peace and harmony have reigned for countless generations. A group calling themselves the New Order have grown bored and fed up with perfection and formed a rebellion, an uprising that spreads across dimensions and before long Earth itself becomes embroiled in the fight over the next age of mankind.

I must admit that I found Earth Sink a very difficult novel to read, it seems that there have been little real attempt to edit the work and the prose is difficult to follow, feeling very disjointed. One minute we are reading about the authors own dream then the next moment the story shifts to this alien world with no pause for breath or any real explanation, as such half the time is spent trying to understand why we are now suddenly reading about some completely different characters on a different world.

The story itself is completely swallowed up in both overly descriptive dialog and exposition which flat lines the pace and while there are a few attempts to resuscitate it never really get's going again. This could perhaps be rescued with the prose was written in an easy reading, friendly style - but it's not.

The paragraphs seem almost endless in places and the 496 pages of the book have only been separated into 5 chapters, that's a lot to slog through without a break. For some authors (Terry Pratchett is a good example) this isn't an issue and can create works that don't require any chapters at all but they are few and far between and even then it can be tricky to achieve.

Here though it's just all too much and none of it really makes any kind of sense, I can understand what the author was trying to achieve and there are some important messages in the book but all of them lie buried. On the face value we have the rebellion of the heavenly hosts but the real message is about our own path to self destruction, along with the much discussed theory of the new world order that ultimately controls everything we do. There is a very apocalyptic and almost biblical vision but one that is lost in the unstructured and meandering text.

Earth Sink has some good ideas but it just doesn't work as a readable novel.