Book review: Final Days

Final Daze by Gazza Gibbo opens with an eerie claustrophobic exploration of an enigmatic alien structure hundreds of trillions of years in the future. This is by far the best part of the book, and why I started reading it. Alas it is all too soon over and we return you to your regular diet of wham-bam unthinking action in a variety of uninteresting locations.

Incidentally, the "hundreds of trillions" is just candy, really; it is of no great importance, and also they don't say how they know: the only clues appear to be the appearance of the sky, and could you really tell one, ten or a hundred trillion apart? Better books, like Icehenge, have their chronology uncertain and debated and actually matter to the plot.

Aanyway, back to the action: various people wander around - it takes a while to work out which ones we are following - and an important shipment of alien material is lost on Earth, hijacked. Predictably enough it turns out to be deadly and a "plague" of giant structures starts eating the Earth (it seems a bizarre coincidence that just the hijacked shipment is deadly; or perhaps they all are; the book hints at some connection between the disaster and the resurrected man); most of the rest of the excitement is then about Our Hero getting off Earth and shutting down the gates (did I mention that there are wormhole gates that humans have made, and also we've found distant mysterious alien gates that connect to the said far future) before the evil alien stuff infects the colonies, too.

At the end, the bloke who has been reconstructed by alien tech says that no, the alien stuff is actually trying to be helpful, by transporting people forward into the far future where they can live with genuine free will. But our hero destroys the gates anyway, because he has a messiah complex, and the book doesn't try to argue with him.

Aside: given the catastrophe that losing a wormhole would be, and in the book is, wouldn't it be prudent to take two or even three with you?

The book gets some points by knowing enough relativity to realise that, were they possible, wormholes are also time machines (but loses some by not realising that two, back to back, are one by themselves and don't require some FTL communicator). It then gets its knickers dreadfully twisted when it realises that this implies terrible things for free will - the plot is driven by videos-from-the-future showing the destruction to come - and "solves" that by having the aliens having decided to disappear off into the future past the end of the last wormhole, thus regaining free will. At this point, recall William's Principle: no-one ever says anything intelligent about free will.

This (enthusiastic) review reminds me that he also wrote The Thousand Emperors.