- Title:
- The Artifact
- By:
- Peter Cawdron
- Pages:
- 314
- Rating:
- 4
Five hundred miles from the Mediterranean, deep in the interior of Libya, lost in the heart of the Sahara itself, lies an oasis trapped in the past. With no surface water, Harat Zuwayyah barely supports any life at all. The scorching wind howls across the desert, driving the sand and threatening to bury the village. Professor Susan Taylor excavates an Egyptian tomb dated to prehistoric times. She uncovers the mummified remains of a wealthy family that died on the trade route, revealing insights into a lost culture, but it’s the talisman watching over the grave that causes her heart to race. Red eyes glow from the back of the cave…
FIRST CONTACT is a series of stand-alone novels that explore humanity’s first interaction with extraterrestrial life. This series is similar to BLACK MIRROR or THE TWILIGHT ZONE in that the series is based on a common theme rather than common characters. This allows these books to be read in any order. Technically, they’re all first as they all deal with how we might initially respond to contact with aliens, exploring the social, political, religious, and scientific aspects of First Contact.
It was interesting to me that our lead is from wales, that being the country of my own birth. I sort of began to think about wondering, hang on, when do we see any alien interaction at all? And then it just totally didn’t matter. The story was about us, too. More in some ways. The alienness was interesting, the vignette from their perspective utterlrly chilling, and some of the exposition – O’connor’s scientific thing was a work of art – rendering the whole book pretty captivating from start to finish. Not perhaps in my top 3, but certainly glad I baught it and will be after anything else Peter writes.