Updates to Come Soon

I'm just finishing up a couple Pike novels, and will have them both up by week's end. Looking forward to thoughts. Especially any by Josh Delcore!

I: "The Starlight Crystal"

Title: "The Starlight Crystal"
front tag: 'she lived until the end of time'
back tag: 'the secret mission lasted forever'



Library Description: It is 200 years in the future. Paige Christian, 18, has been given the chance to join the crew of the Traveler--a special spaceship/time capsule designed to circle the solar system and study the changes on earth throughout two centuries. But an awful thing happens to the earth--and the Traveler.
Synopsis: Okay. This may not have been the best choice for the first book on the blog, because wow. A whole lot of things happen in this 194 page book, and that is not even remotely an exaggeration. There's a girl, her name is Paige. Disregard the back of the book, she's not so much 'given a chance' to join the crew as she is forced to join the crew because her father is the captain and the mission is for 2 centuries of circling the universe. Basically, the mission of The Traveler is to serve as sort of a living Time Capsule for the future.

Things go VERY wrong for the crew, and for everyone back on Earth. But more about that in a bit. Before she goes on her mission, Paige meets a boy named Tem and falls in love. You have your standard I WILL LOVE YOU UNTIL THE END OF TIME starcrossed lovers torn apart scene, and then off they go. Tem promises to send her letters, she will do the same. I'm not entirely positive how that works, given she'll be traveling FTL, but it does.

Heeeeeeere's where it starts to get tricky. Before she leaves, Paige meets a 'familiar' looking woman. Her name is Alpha Book, and she seems to know Paige. The implication is that they met once at a party, but Paige doesn't really remember that. Alpha's purpose seems to be just to wish her good luck, so it seems fairly unimportant, right? Right. Remember it anyway.

After a few years of ftling about the galaxy, the crew of the Traveler discover that everyone on Earth has pretty much been slaughtered by a race of aliens called the Shamere. Not only that, but now the Shamere want to destroy them too. Before that can happen, a Good Alien saves the day, and somehow Paige becomes captain of the Traveler even though here is a perfectly adequate first officer. They discover, hey, the Shamere have human dna. Hey. That's weird.

Okay, at this point I'm going to summarise this bullet point style. Way too much happens to do otherwise.

• God takes over the body of a girl named Kabrina and tells them how to make clones. Yes. Exactly.
• Paige psychically mind-melds with a clone of the Shamere Queen and learns how to manipulate dna.
• The Traveler discovers an Earth Escape Ship full of smart people and their families to rescue what is left of the human race
• Tem is aboard, as well as his new wife named Heila Derby. Everyone is in cryopods and is able to be defrosted, save for Tem and Heila. They died enroute.
• Paige takes Tem's body to New Earth to be buried, and before she can, his body is inhabited by the Spirit of Creation, whose name is Alosha. (I believe Alosha is the name of another Pike book, but I am not positive the books are related)
• Alosha tells Paige to make everyone on the Traveler go vacay on New Earth and then steal the ship and zip around for a couple hundred years. She does this, of course.
• Paige lands on (New?) Earth and takes the name Alpha Book. One day, she is out for a walk and sees a girl messing around the city. A girl names Paige. She thinks about killing her, and then she does not.
• Paige leaves on the Traveler, as per the begining, and Alpha gets an apartment and a new identity as Heila Derby. She gets a job as a genetic scientist and meets a young man named Tem in the park. After some negotiation, they begin dating. After she reveals herself as Future(?)Paige, they get married.
• Heila impregnates herself with a clone of Tem, and then a few years later a clone of herself.
• The earth is evacuated because the Shamere invaded, and it is revealed that Paige ALSO made THEM.
• Heila manipulates the cryo-tanks so that Tem and herself die, but not before doing some weird thing so that CloneBaby knows that she is also Paige.
• After twenty odd years, Clone!Paige and Clone!Tem take a ship to go and destroy the Shamere homeworld. They do this, but Clone!Tem dies.
• Clone!Paige changes her name to Alpha and goes to live on an alien world where everyone looks human but is blue. She becomes a weaver, and then meets the King of the Blue Aliens who tells her that she is God.
• God meets Alosha/Tem, who apparently is also Paige.

THE END.

Twist Ending: Pretty much every major character is Paige Christian. Even her own boyfriend. Also, God.

Dialogue: "Right now, I believe I share the same soul as you."

SCIENCE!: Paige exists in a causal timeloop, a version of a predestination paradox.

MYSTIC RELIGION!: Being immortal is burdensome and clumsy. And apparently full of cloning.
HEY. WAIT A MINUTE!: "The Starlight Crystal" is also the title of a book written by another Pike character, Shari Cooper, in "Remember Me 3", so far as I can tell, it's the same book.

Thoughts: Given that 900,000 things appear to happen in this book, would you be stunned to see it is only 194 pages long? Because I sure was. I've been reading Pike all my life, it's always been like reading crack. He's like the literate version of RL Stine, but holy god, Kev. That's a LOT of PLOT.