My review of Dilation first appeared on August 3, 2022, on the Independent Book Review site. It was named one of the best books of 2022 by that website. I’m happy to share the word about this great story here on The Storytelling Blog.
In a big story painted on a big canvas, humankind suffers from its own folly as well as an alien race’s plan for its annihilation. The human drive to survive propels the epic science fiction novel, Dilation.
Dilation’s Story
In Dilation: A 10,000 Year Sci-Fi Epic, author Travis Stecher takes on a vast subject, nothing short of the near destruction of humanity. The story brings together people from across nations, planets, solar systems, and historical epochs to combat an extinction threat from light-years away: a technologically advanced alien species known, to the humans at least, as the cephrast.
The book opens with momentous events. In the year 2023, rural Georgia, USA, a hastily assembled team of experts attempt first contact with a crashed alien spacecraft. Unfortunately, the cephrast visitors are killed almost immediately, and before long American scientists decipher the intent of an automatically activated beacon from the crashed ship: Exterminate all humans. Earth and its future colonies have one hope for salvation. The cephrasts won’t arrive for 10,000 years.
Time Travel is Key
Humankind devotes itself to defense preparation, learning much from the advanced alien technology aboard the spacecraft. One ingenious power is time travel, which allows elite cadres of soldiers, scientists, and technicians to travel to the far distance future for the final alien show down. Thus, the reader can follow characters met as members of the disastrous first contact team into the actual alien invasion battles.
The story moves forward in time, centering on two members of the first contact team, Denise Walker, an ecological scientist turned xenobiologist, and Isaac Fowler, a security agent, but also backwards, focusing on a Martian pilot, Nadia Raynor. In the course of the story the reader sees humanity, via advantages gleaned from the crashed alien tech, move from Earth to colonize the solar system and eventually establish humanity in another star system.
Dilation’s Engaging Narrative
Dilation’s prose is skillful and the voice confident with wry humor that grounds the narrative, especially when things get dark and heavy. “This was still a victory worth celebrating. They’d gone toe-to-toe with machine-controlled ships and survived. Granted, they’d spent most of the fight hiding in a different universe, but it was a feat nonetheless.” It is easy to trust the omniscient storyteller, even with the tale’s vast and complicated material.
Humanity as the Protagonist
Unsurprisingly, a lot of different characters appear in this book. They are well-rounded individuals with unique voices, but none have enough “screentime” to stand-out as a point-of-view character. The book is the story of humankind rather than any one person. Everyone in the book has the same primary motivator: to save the human race by defeating the aliens. Anything else is of minor concern in comparison. We see some of their personal ambitions, family relationships, and love interests, but everyone in the story is focused on the threat. They have dedicated their lives to this defense.
Some situations describe alien-invasion doubters or the various international conflicts of “normal life,” which degenerate into all-out war among the humans, but the story focus remains the alien invasion.
Much of the story is told in engaging summary. Sometimes, however, the tale rushes through narrative that might be more effective as a scene.
Dilation’s Worldbuilding
The book integrates worldbuilding details into story, enriching the background in the reader’s mind while moving the narrative forward. For example, the Martian pilot, Nadia Raynor, receives some discouraging news while in the base mess hall. “With her appetite gone, Raynor dumped the entire plate into the recycler and walked back to her bunk, allowing the bin to separate her food’s molecules for future use.”
Dilation brings science fact and speculation together in a plausible way. It maintains the wonder at the possibilities inherent in scientific discovery, which is the heart of successful science fiction. An extensive reference list is included, which underscores the facts behind the fiction.
Readers who enjoyed The Expanse (a book series as well as Amazon Prime series) will appreciate Dilation’s grand scale, well-rendered characters, and ingenious melding of scientific possibilities with logical speculation about what lies ahead in humanity’s future.
If you found Dilation interesting, you might enjoy reading about Character Creation.
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Last year the St. Louis Writers Guild published Love Letters to St. Louis. This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations includes my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime: A Self-Guided Tour.” Profits benefit the guild’s young writers’ program.