Book Review: A Vision of Fire (by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin)

The reviews for this were optimistic and vague. Most seemed to center around the fact that the novel (the first of a series) is by Agent Scully. Taglines on the back proclaim, “Gillian Anderson is returning to the genre that made her a cultural icon.” -Entertainment Weekly, “This is basically the dream of nerds everywhere.” -Flavorwire. But is it? it’s cowritten by Jeff Rovin, he’s written 130 books of varying genres, fiction, non-fiction, TV shows. He frequently ghostwrites. Which makes me wonder how much of this was written by who. Not that it actually matters or not, a good book is a good book but if it is depending on a big name in Sci-fi to sell books and it’s that of an actress instead of an author… well, it seems like selling out.

Anyway, the characters are great. Caitlyn, Maanik, Ben, Jacob, Flora, Gaelle are well thought out and planned. No one appears just to stumble on clues for the MCs. Caitlyn is a professional woman with a well rounded life who embarks on this journey to find the cause of a traumatised child’s suffering and ends up finding ties to an ancient race. She travels the globe and starts a romance with a colleague without coming up Pollyanna-ish or forgetting she has a son, a family and other professional obligations. Which happens a ton in the fantasy genre (how is Sookie Stackhouse still employed?).

Book One of the Earthend Saga, as it also is called, starts out slow, the characterization works well, but we don’t get to the meat of what is happening until the last quarter of the book. The daughter of the ambassador to the United Nations witnesses an assassination attempt on her father and starts coming apart at the seams. Across the globe a boy spontaneously self-immolates. A political conflict in Kashmir threatens a world war. A woman watches her mother nearly drown in Haiti. And all these events are connected.

And Caitlyn comes to discover that the suffering is connected to events like this across time and space.

Suffering does not exist in a vacuum. We are all connected.

That is the main theme of the book, and it was enjoyable. But not astounding.

But if you think about it deeply, we are becoming more of a global society and we need to stop think of events in other countries as far away, about past tragedies as “long ago” or barbaric, we need to stop thinking of those suffering in war torn countries as “other”. We only have one planet here and no matter what, we are all connected and we are connected to events past and present and we have more in common than we may realize.

3/5 Stars