“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–indus...