“A High-Action Space Adventure”: A Review of The Year before the End by Vidar Hokstad

 

(Hokstad Publishing, 2020). ASIN: B08NXXM64P

In 2020 and early 2021 I wrote a number of reviews of novels in the dystopian future genre. As we were all locked inside and the future of the world grew more uncertain day by day, I had to add the caveat—although, to me, it is value-added—that these novels were in many ways less fiction and more handbooks for increasingly possible/probable futures.

Although I have been a paranormal investigator for 12 years—a situation I fell into after a very strange encounter in 2009—I never thought I would put a novel like Vidar Hokstad’s The Year before the End in this same category. However, after the big (public—it was well known and whispered about for years) unveiling of the U.S. Space Force, the recent and by and large hollow “disclosure” report, and the billionaire space race to colonize Mars and the Moon, this Old West–style space adventure is a cautionary tale about how it will most likely be corporate oligarchy meets military–industrial–intelligence complex business as usual in the, to borrow from Star Trek, “final frontier.”

It is also a well-paced, entertaining ride.

As the story opens, Mars and the Moon are colonized, with millions of inhabitants.

In 2105, SETI received a communication from outer space that let Earth know for sure that it was not alone. Similar to Carl Sagan’s Contact, the message—consisting of advanced math and physics elements—is an extended loop that takes months to decipher. A “gate” (portal or wormhole, if you’d like) was built eight years later, at the request of beings from Centauri, who embedded the plans in the cipher (but not Alpha Centauri—the origin point here is not disclosed).

Hokstad either has an excellent grasp of the science or is adept at faking it—famous sci-fi writers have fallen into both categories and it doesn’t matter. The rich detail adds to the three-dimensional, immersive world building without bogging down the story or confusing the reader with a bunch of jargon and references to complicated technologies. His detail of the surface features of both Mars and the Moon is impressive as well. I felt no need to look up the volcanoes and other geological points to see if they were real. Again, it doesn’t matter.

The Year before the End has all the tropes sci-fi readers love, from smugglers and mercenaries with steely nerves and snappy dialogue to up-tight commanders of space stations to ship battles and the resulting damage to the ships that improvisational hands and minds have to fix just in the nick of time. There are also rebel groups, spies, stolen schematics, and wealthy provocateurs.

And ubiquitous use of deep fake video and fake news.

In terms of predictive programming, religious cults spring up and military debates begin—very in line with Werner von Braun’s prediction that, after religious terrorism, which we have just lived through for decades, what is left is aliens.

The hero of the story is Zo, a fiery ship captain with a dark past. In vengeance for dead crew members, she once used a plasma rifle to remove body parts while simultaneously cauterizing the wounds—and she is willing to do it again.

Zo’s crew on the Black Rain has a wide mix of personalities, which every space opera needs. The solitude of space and confined area of a spaceship make for lots of “action is character” moments. Joss Whedon was masterful at this with Firefly. For Hokstad, this is an opportunity to bring in the mystery box—spies and turncoats abound as the narrative unfolds.  

At the outset of the story, Zo is hired to retrieve a mysterious object from a space station, a job whose consequences fuel the rest of the narrative.

The Big Bads in this series are Sovereign Earth, a group that does not want Mars or the Moon to have independence. They are also warhawks and not at all fans of the completion of an Earth–Centauri gate. They are well funded, ruthless, and some readers may identify with them and their ideals more than a little.

The Centauri act as the wildcard, with the possibility that they would ally with Mars to give the Martian population its desired independence. Think France during the American Revolution.

With all the galactic intrigue and clashing personalities and philosophies you could want, The Year before the End will have you cheering for Zo and (most of) her crew as they increasingly get in over their heads in a cosmic conspiracy that our descendants may one day face.

Readers will enjoy the homages by way of names of ships, classes, and locations. There are Beastmaster-class warships; a Viking-class ship named the Leonidas; a station called Nautilus; references to pirates and the Jolly Roger; and Mars military stations called Hercules and Deimos, which means terror.

Nautilus—designed and decorated like its namesake in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea— is owned by a wealthy industrialist named Terrell who is given to using phrases like “will to power.” I thought of Brandon Fugol, Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos who are currently driving the exploration and colonization of space and the paranormal/supernatural. If I was casting this for film, Terrell would be David Warner, Terrence Stamp, or Derek Jacobi.

Given the popularity of The Mandalorian and the continued cult status of Firefly, there should be a considerable and eager audience for The Year before the End, which is a Galaxy Bound Novel, Book 1 of 6 of the Sovereign Earth Series. There is a compelling cliffhanger wherein Zo makes a deal that looks too good to be true for the circumstances she is in, so if you like the captain and crew’s first adventure, there is much more intrigue and dire warning to come.