Review::Thirsty Planet by Robert Tell

Thirsty Planet by Bob Tell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Thirsty Planet by Robert Tell

This is a classic example of why we shouldn't judge a book by it's cover.(of course now the cover for the e-book has changed.) This one brought to mind-a steamy romance. I usually read the blurb and then read the sample. So I must have read the sample-or since I do have someone who likes steamy romances maybe they downloaded it. In which case it's a good thing for me they judge a book by it's cover-not so good for them- but quite good for me. I really enjoyed this story and it was both thought provoking and entertaining.

Oddly though it began in a way I usually hate- We have a nameless character who gets killed at the beginning, or it looks that way. It starts in the year 2121 with a dystopic world and this squatter is drifting across the water toward home with his cargo of stolen potable water. In a world that's under water and suffering from the effects of global warming-life seems cheap. Next we move back in time closer to us in the year 2022 where Cassie and Paul Lopez fight the evil corporate world that is turning a blind eye to global warming. This book contains a lot of arguments that I can't say I particularly agree with but they do make the story interesting and move it forward.

We quickly jump back to 2121 where Keesha Leder is our next victim while her husband is away at work. Dr. Moss Leder works at Pulsarsoft where they are working to find solutions to the global catastrophe. (The reader will soon learn that corporations and politics are still as troublesome in the future as they are to Paul and Cassie in the past.) Moss is secretly working on a time machine as his belief is that the only way to fix things is to be sure they never happen. He's kept his work secret from even his lab assistant. Only he and his wife knew of it and now it's just him, which is why he decides he has to tell his assistant, Zoe Reuel.

This story touches heavily on the corruption of government in 2022 and the blind eye of most people to the global warming. What helps it is that the future has all the earmarks of there being a true dilemma. In 2022 Paul and Cassie are dangerous to the people in power and need to be silenced. In the future the time machine Moss is building threatens those in power who have taken advantage of the global situation to remain in power. This is how these two stories are on the verge of converging.

In 2121 most people have abandoned religion, but somehow Robert Tell manages to weave religion into the whole story with a multi-religious Zionist movement that decides to help the people working on time travel. Everything goes wrong on both sides of the time equation until the time machine is ready.

The story almost ends abruptly-but not badly. The ending makes perfect sense and leaves much for food for thought. You will have to read it to find out.

Great SFF for fans of the genre-not so much a romance-good book to make you think without getting too heady about it. There's a lot of room between the last two chapters for a whole bunch of story that the reader gets to infer so who knows maybe someday Robert will decide to Tell us a bit about it.

There are some weird formatting issues with this book where paragraphs get separated in the middle but it's not something that I feel should cause the star system to collapse.


J.L. Dobias



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