Firewatcher: Book 1 of the Exodus/Genesis Series

by Tom Trimbath

Escaping a digital dystopia
Too little time to safely plan and prepare
Can they survive? In a world where people trust computers more than people, power shifts.
A resistance movement finds a way to flee while in plain sight. No one is perfect, not even the aliens, and who is really alien?

305 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2022

Reviews

[Jason Pryde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclosure, Tom Trimbath is a friend and fellow Whidbey Islander. I've been following Tom's progress on this novel over Twitter for several months. Because of this my impressions as I read this book were not entirely unfiltered. I've tried to record these impressions below without prejudice but, as with any book review, your mileage may vary.

Meta
The author carefully distinguishes fantasy fiction from science fiction. The former having fewer constraints in creative plot development and the latter, while speculative in nature, still finds its muse in the principles of science, mathematics, and the scientific method in general. FireWatcher, Book 1 of the Exodus/Genesis Series is from its inception, science fiction.
In the credits, he calls out "Mathematics" and, in particular, the formula: e^(iπ)+1=0 otherwise known to the cognoscenti as Euler's Identity and sometimes referred to as "God's Formula"¹ and questionably "Euler's Proof of God"²
The reader can only surmise how the author arrived at the plot of FireWatcher while contemplating a mathematical formula, even one as elegant and complete as this one. After having read the book, I can say that 1) It takes a deeper understanding of math than mine to make this connection, and 2) Lacking this understanding does not take away the thrill of reading an otherwise fascinating science fiction story.

The author also draws on his background in aerospace engineering, philosophy, and careful observations of human nature. More than once, I found myself running to the internets to back fill concepts such as the Boltzmann Brain Thought Experiment and levels of consciousness during meditation. Like any good Sci-Fi, the deeper you dig, the more you get out of it.

The book is self published through the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing system. This means that while the author and his indulgent friends do their best to produce a quality product, it doesn't get the kind of character by character fine-toothed scrutiny a major publisher can afford to invest in a new book. Thus, there will be the occasional spell-checker errors, printing faux pas, and possibly intentional omissions such as page numbers for instance. This is just context for the adventurous reader who likes to wander off of the best seller lists to get a fuller picture of the writing community.

Lastly, the prose can get a bit salty at times. While this book will never be confused with pornography, the gentle reader may find themselves cringing in places but no more than in a good Hemingway novel.

About the story
Without spoiling the story, I think I can say that the arc of the plot begins when a group of colonists from Earth land their space ship on a totally foreign planet in a totally foreign star system in much the same vain as the pilgrims who landed in the shores of North America to escape certain hardships back home. Some of the conflicts that arise are existential ie. can they both survive and thrive on this rough simulacrum of earth? But the story is not just a take on the survivalist genre akin to "The Martian"³.
Due to the inevitable group dynamics of multiple characters, some conflicts are relational, that is human vs human and human vs alien. In fact, there is percolating tension between exactly who is the alien and who is the native in this new society (and it is not either/or) that the colonists find themselves.
In this way, the story provides rich metaphors for the conflicts we read about and even engage in today, here on earth. I suspect that every reader will come to different conclusions about the author's intents.
There are certain questions that popped up in my mind while reading the story. I wondered why specific characters did not make the same logical jumps that occurred to me at critical junctures and what seemed to be inconsistencies in behavior of some of the characters. I came to the conclusion that character development is an evolving process in a story that is intended to spread across multiple books.
I did find myself longing for a prequel as the brief descriptions of a techno-apocalyptic condition on back on earth call to my fascination with social devolution and dystopia.


Takeaways
By looking past the minor inconveniences of the first edition publication and recognizing that this is the authors first foray into fiction⁴, the reader will likely reach a state of partnership with the protagonists, mentally engaging in the conversations, questioning the conclusions, and ultimately left hanging in suspense for Book 2 of the Exodus/Genesis Series.

Footnotes
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%2...
2. For an interesting coverage of the controversy see the Quora discussion at https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Eulers-...
3. https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-W...
4. Tom Trimbath has a significant oeuvre of non-fiction publications which can be found in a search on Amazon.