“An Innovative Twist on Epic History”: A Review of Immortal Alexandros (Book Four of the Ptolemaios Saga), by Alexander Geiger

 

 (Ptolemaios Publishing and Entertainment LLC, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-09892584-8-7

It’s always interesting to read the end of a main character’s arc, rather than its start (David Chase’s The Sopranos). We meet in Immortal Alexandros an Alexander the Great whose cumulative battle wounds (including numerous blows to the head) lead him to paranoia, violence with staff, and a relentless march to the Mediterranean over seven years. As age, disease, harsh environments, and constant battles decimate his army, I reflected on the “Myth of the Great Man” that’s caused suffering and death throughout human history.

Immortal Alexandros presents a historically accurate physical world, with immersive descriptions of open-air markets, harems, battlefields, the Hindu Kush, and other locations. Equally immersive are descriptions of Zoroastrianism, military tactics, and medicinal techniques.

Like William Hurt’s accent in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, I found the language at first to be too modern and wondered if it was a clue. It was. The Ptolemaios of the series title is the narrator and Alexandros’s close advisor. He’s a time traveler who inadvertently changed history nine years prior. He saved the life of a teenager who should have died, who then saved Alexandros who should have died. Ptolemaios is trapped, with his next chance to escape a decade away, with the odds of success diminishing because of “inertial tendencies of the temporal stream” or, as Stephen King says in 11/22/63, “The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to change.”

In this alternate history, Dareios, ruler of Persia, has had three major defeats, resulting in the surrender of Babylon.

Geiger excels at depicting the complex relationships of the Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians, at times making Game of Thrones look like preschool. Ruling an empire, managing wives and concubines, and keeping generals and advisors happy is difficult, to say nothing of the day-to-day of betrayals, spies, defections, and negotiations with potential allies and enemies. 

Although war novels are usually only about men, Geiger devotes ample story to women: concubines, wives, mothers, mistresses, and royal offspring. They are strong-willed and as capable of strategy and machinations as the men.

If you want to deep-dive into the book and series, there are fifteen color maps, animated battle depictions, and more at the author’s website, alexandergeiger.com. The book has footnotes with historical information, definitions, and references to previous books, as well as characters and location compendiums. These are helpful, since the book is over 500 pages.

(I received this book as an ARC on Reedsy Discovery).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“A Firsthand Account of Secret Societies”: A Review of 334‰ Lies: The Revelation of H. M. v. Stuhl.

   Translated by Samuel Chong (English trans. June 2021; originally published in German in 2000). ISBN: 9798513274353 In an age of Conspiracy Theory Mania—a mix of those who revel in it and those who completely reject it—there are few subjects that are as thorny and contentious as the idea that there are secret lodges or societies that set the course of geopolitics from the shadows, engineering puppet governments, wars, and catastrophes to subjugate humanity and main ultimate control. From the innocuous fraternal organizations like the Freemasons, to political and economic organizations like the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and Club of Rome, the idea that a select few are making decisions for billions is one that is often met with anger and fierce recrimination. No matter the “evidence” put forth about odd places like Bohemian Grove and secret satchels with documents outlining the course of wars originating with the Bavarian Illuminati; no
Read more

“ETs Among Us”: A Review of Earth’s Galactic History: And Its Extraterrestrial Connection by Constance Victoria Briggs

   (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-948803-62-5 Over the past several years, through the publication and positive reviews of her Encyclopedia of Moon Mysteries and The Moon’s Galactic History , Constance Victoria Briggs has become a leading authority on the subject of visitations to Earth and the Moon by extraterrestrials. There are two reasons for her ascendancy into this well-deserved, hard-earned position. First, Briggs does exhaustive amounts of research, structuring her books like PhD dissertations (the structural design of MGH and EGH is similar). Second, she remains a hopeful but very staunch skeptic. She is primarily a reporter. She presents the facts and lets the reader do with them what they will, without gloss. In this way, she is like Dr. Michael Salla and Paul Blake Nelson. Although she traverses the same landscapes as the Ancient Alien crowd (one of whom, David Childress, is her publisher), Briggs is the Joe Friday of the bunch: “Just the facts.” In
Read more

“Jung in Larger Context”: A Review of Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung: A Collaboration, by Nan Savage Healy

 (Los Angeles: Tiberius Press, 2017). ISBN: 978-0-9981128-0-0 (paperback) In the interest of Disclosure, I served as the editor for this book. That said, and keeping in mind the relationship of editors like Maxwell Perkins with their writers (in his case, no less than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and, somewhat synchronistically—to use Jung’s term—Thomas Wolfe), this should not preclude a fair review. Indeed, editors are reviewing books all the time. The difference is, they have the opportunity to provide different eyes to the author’s work before the fact, as opposed to reviewers, who do so after the fact (although I have done a number of pre-publication reviews that precipitated changes before publication). But enough of that. I agreed to the editing contract for the same reason that I am now reviewing Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung— Nan Savage Healy’s detailed and insightful exploration of Jung’s unsung and nearly obliterated collaborator shines a powerful light on Jung, whom I, like
Read more