Book Review -- Antarktos Rising

One of the great things about my new writing career is that, while researching agents and publishers, I came across a whole host of novels I might not otherwise have found or read on my own. Antarktos Rising by Jeremy Robinson is just such a novel. Though it was published by Variance Publishing back in 2008, it features a topic that is very popular today -- the Nephilim.

I'm sure all of you who read this blog have read my own novel, Release, and therefore are quite familiar with who the Nephilim are in Judeo-Christian mythology ;-), but just to refresh your memory, the Nephilim were man-eating giants, descendants of angels and mortal women, who populated the earth in the days before they were wiped out by the great flood (though it seems that they may have been around afterwards, too). 

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.”

– Genesis 6:4

Basically, the premise of the novel is this:  the earth's crust shifts drastically, causing the magnetic poles to shift and basically, much of the earth ends up under ice and uninhabitable. The only land left for humans (what's left of them, as the shifting of the crusts and resulting climate change happens quite suddenly, killing most everyone) that is habitable is Antarctica, which is now a lush, green paradise.

Our heroine (yay -- you go girl!), Mirabelle Whitney, is picked (or rather, forced) to be on a team of elite members who are to compete in a race with other countries (or conglomerates thereof) to claim Antarctica. Why is she picked, when she's just a wildlife photographer? Because her father knows more about the land down under more than anyone -- he's actually trapped down there when all this crustal displacement starts.

So Mira must find her dad, compete with other teams, some of whom will do anything to win, and make it across Antarctica. As the team gets deeper and deeper into the new land, however, they find that things which they thought were long gone had merely been frozen for centuries, and are now out and about, looking for food and vengeance.

Okay, let me state right off the bat that for the most part, I can suspend my disbelief with regards to science and accept whatever fiction is thrown at me -- that to me is part of the fun of reading, to take the impossible and make it into a 'real' story. I've read that this novel got negative reviews for its implausible science, but honestly -- it didn't bother me one bit.

This is a plot-driven novel, though the author does take a bit of time to develop characters, though don't expect something out of Austen, and I liked them well enough that I wasn't happy when some of them died. It's not a deep novel, but rather a light, fun adventure full of ancient civilizations, crossovers of religions, danger, and father-daughter bonding. The mythology was very interesting, and the pace for this type of novel was very good. The ending is very much a cliffhanger, and if there is a sequel I will be interested to see where this author takes the story.

Something Wicked -- 3/5