Final Days [Kindle Edition]

Gary's latest, his fifth novel, is a novel of future apocalypse and wormholes. Written in a fast paced style from a number of different people's viewpoints, it is a cracking holiday read.

The story is set in 2235. The key premise of the tale is that wormholes, if one end is accelerated to relativistic speeds, can allow people to travel hundreds of light years quickly. People who travel outside the gate can eventually catch up with the people who have travelled through the gate but only by travelling at standard speeds. Thus we appear to travel in time, with those going through the wormholes able to travel into the future, so to speak.

We start the novel with an expedition. One of the things that wormhole travel has allowed humans to do is explore places far from Earth. There are relics out in the universe of other races, though seemingly long gone, which are being carefully explored. When an expedition is sent to Vault 17 in Gate Delta, a now-deserted Gateway of wormholes, Jeff Cairns sees two of their members seemingly killed, but then, moments later, one of them, Mitchell Stone, re-appears.

This is one of many mysteries the wormholes seem to have. On Earth, the loss of a wormhole connection to the Galileo colony a few years back, for reasons unknown, is another that has become a concern. The two places have yet to be re-connected (and as time goes on may or may not be due to what is happening on Earth.) Saul Dumont knows this better than anyone. He's still trying to cope with the loss of the wormhole link to the Galileo system, which has stranded him on Earth far from his wife and child for the past several years.

Only weeks away from the link with Galileo finally being re-established, he stumbles across a conspiracy to suppress the discovery of a second, alien network of wormholes.

Things are complicated further when we discover the reason for the second expedition's secrecy. They have travelled to the near future of 2245 and discovered a devastated, lifeless solar system - all except for the original Mitchell Stone, found preserved in a cryogenics chamber on Luna. Not only that but it seems that Earth has little time left. From video footage taken in the future, Copernicus City on the Moon is seen in ruins. Strange plant-like growths are seen mushrooming out of the Earth's oceans, causing the Earth to be swathed in cloud and apparently killing all life beneath them. The Earth seems doomed, with most of its population unlikely to survive.

Saul realises that to stop further destruction, he has to shut down all the gateways, before the damage reaches the colonies. Fighting to get to the Moon to do this, he finds himself in a battle against one of the Mitchell Stones who seems equally keen to stop him.

This is a big Niven-esque type disaster novel, or perhaps a Greg Bear (Forge of God springs to mind), so much so that it really needs one of those dramatis personae lists at the front. Though there are the main characters, a number of others are there to help develop the plot, which are a little more less developed and can take careful following.

It's also a book that you have to just accept at the beginning, even when things don't always make immediate sense travelling forward and backward in time. It's a tale that needs a while to set the scene and develop. Of course, as we have `seen' video from 2245, we know what is going to happen: if the title of the book doesn't give it away, it does seem that the future is set and unchangeable, though this is never as clear-cut as it sounds.

However by the mid-point of the book, this tale's up and running and it's a fast, exciting read with a dramatic twist towards the end and some very interesting developments which will no doubt be explored further in the next book.
I liked this a lot, in that it's a plot-driven old-school type of tale with some great new ideas to make it work. I think this is Gary's best to date, and look forward to the next in the series.

After I read Angel Stations way back in 2008 I knew Gary Gibson was an author I would be reading more of. I followed that up by reading Stealing Light and that didn't change my opinion at all, rather it reinforced it. Nova War, the sequel to Stealing Light, was also a great read, but for reasons that still escape me I never got around to the final book in that series, Empire of Light. Final Days is his new book in a brand new setting and, as expected, reaffirms Gary's position as one of the top SF writers active today.

In the distant future a team from Earth has, through a network of alien wormholes, discovered the ruins left behind by another civilisation, codenamed Site 17. This is a future where the stars have died and the galaxies spread out so far that nothing is visible in the night sky. But there is much here that is of interest to those in power, and they want to find out the secrets of this place. During one of the excursions Mitchell Stone is trapped in a pit and swallowed by liquid that fills it from nowhere with great speed. But when the rest of the team find him minutes later out of his suit and in apparent disorientation the question is raised: what has happened to him? This is not the end of Mitchell Stone, for a human made wormhole has been into Earth's future and found a devastated and lifeless planet, all except for Mitchell Stone who is found in stasis on the lunar facilities that hold all wormholes to humanity's interstellar colonies.

Saul Dumont is a government operative, working in the upper echelons on undercover and secretive missions, his one goal to find out who was responsible for the termination of the Galileo wormhole that left him stranded light years from his family. But his investigations lead him to some interesting facts, facts that those in power would rather he not know. And then the alien growths start across the planet, growths that will signal the end of the Earth and all who live there...

Final Days is one of those novels that has a major hook in the first chapter, raising all sorts of questions and possibilities, but then seemingly goes off on a tangent. I must admit that this pulled me up a little to start with, but as the book progressed the pieces started falling into place. The puzzle that is thrown up at the start involves Mitchell Stone and the incident at Site 17, and then the discovery of a dead Earth mere years into the future - but with Mitchell Stone found in stasis in the lunar city. As the only person that knows what happened he's a tool the government use to glean these details. His colleague from Site 17, Jeff Cairns, has his suspicions too and he starts to make his own enquiries into the situation. Saul Dumont is the other part of the puzzle, seemingly unrelated at the start but becoming an increasingly bigger factor in the story as more and more information comes to light.

Admittedly, it took me a while to get my head around the time-travel aspect of Final Days, but to be honest I simply took what I was being told as fact and let the story carry me along. And that it did! Final Days is a little hard to pigeonhole - it's part time travel, part apocalyptic, part mystery, part action - but one thing that I found was how easy it was to get into and read. Gibson has managed to mix all of these aspects without relying too heavily on any one of them, but equally bringing them all into play to great effect.

One of the big things when writing a novel that involves time travel into the future is the fact that the ending is revealed pretty much straight away. What made Final Days stand out from the crowd was the way in which Gibson was able to give this information freely, but then keep the details hidden, dropping them here and there throughout the novel to allow the bigger picture time to fully reveal itself. It's quite an achievement and, by the end, very successful.

Final Days is a great novel, full of ideas and events that shows once again why science fiction is such a great genre. In the right hands SF can be wonderful, inventive, and hugely enjoyable - and Gary Gibson is just that sort of author. Highly recommended.

Gibson's first novel post-Shoal series (which I wasn't a great fan of really).
Excellent opening sequence reminiscent of the original Alien movie...spacesuited team exploring huge alien structures on a dark, cold world...and guess what....something bad happens.
Turns out a long disappeared race (The Founders) have left us some nasty surprises hidden in their tech (which a covert govt agency are keeping secret of course).
In the novel Gibson explores the idea that once we have the technology to open worm-holes light-years apart, we also have an impromptu time travel device. In the novel this allows us to peer forward in time and glimpse the after effects of a mysterious calamity which has left the Earth barren and unpopulated.
Opening the wormhole effectively means that all events that take place in the time period between the hole's opening are now set in stone, predetermined and fixed. With this realisation our main characters don't waste time trying to prevent the catastrophe (and save the planet's population) instead they work to find the cause and who is to blame for it, and let as many people know as possible. Oh, and get off the planet before it happens of course.
In the meantime, the various covert agencies in the know are working to get as many men and resources off-world to mankind's sprinkling of space colonies as possible. Sod the rest of us.

There's something for everyone here, wormholes reminiscent of Stargate, the end of the world at the hands of mysterious alien forces, corrupt covert agencies, future technologies (the internet is accessed through contact lenses, which I find more aesthetically pleasing than, say, Neal Asher's cyborg-like grafting of hardware to the human body), there is even an old couple who run a space travel company offering trips to the moon in replicas of the Apollo / Saturn 5 moonshots.
Gibson cobbles together a lot of familiar SF tropes into an overall coherent whole here, and I'll be interested to see where he goes with it in his next outing (there is the promise of a series here according to his Wiki entry).
There was something about Final Days that reminded me of Paul McAuley's 'Cowboy Angels' (covert agent redeeming himself in a race against time via handy wormholes etc etc).

I'd give this 6 out of 10...which means it's worth a read, the story jogs along and remains engaging, though hardly original in it's ideas or plot.

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