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Paperback Details
  • 12/2022
  • 978-0-918538-17-8
  • 212 pages
  • $14.99
Bill Harvey
Author
THE MESSAGE
Bill Harvey, author
One day every psychic on Earth receives the same message—but who sent it? The US Theta Force and the Russian Psychotronic Division both want to find them first. Whoever has that much psychic energy will be an invincible ally. West Point career officer Martin Williams had led a team of US special forces when the ISIS-Taliban civil war erupted in Afghanistan, forcing the US to send troops in yet again to protect the already nearly-decimated civilian population. Williams had been disparaged for the uncanny luck his life-saving hunches gave him until one day when the US found out about the Russian Psychotronic Division and figured the US needed its own psychic force—a failed idea in the minds of the Generals old enough to remember the 1970s. Somehow knowing that billionaire technology inventor Ari Mann warranted psychic investigation, President Gomez assigned the new US Theta Force team, with Marty as second-in-command, to the mission—even before the unit was fully formed and long before the team had undergone much training. What Theta Force uncovered would have been mind-blowing enough were it not for another threat vector it was hard to get their heads around—a mysterious message heard by all psychics around the world. Who sent that mysterious message?
Reviews
Harvey (author of Pandemonium, among other titles) continues his epic-scoped Agents of Cosmic Intelligence series with this globe-crossing thriller of expanded consciousness, centered on military officer Martin Williams—a man given to precognitive hunches—and the new U.S. Theta Force team, created by President Gomez as an answer to Russia’s “Psychotronic Division.” Williams, perhaps acting on a hunch, turns down an offer to run Theta Force, instead serving as its executive officer in charge of training and security. The story this time turns on a surprise transmission of uncertain origin received by all of Earth’s psychics: an androgynous voice saying, among other things, “Each of us is God.”

The bold novel that follows teases apart the spiritual, philosophical, and practical truths and implications of that message and its sender in a series of brisk yet thoughtful scenes among a diverse cast of characters. As before, Harvey is engaged with the everyday life of psychics in thriller scenarios, penning crisp, engaging dialogue and a host of surprising scenarios, including special attention paid to the role of sex and eroticism in intimate psychic connections. At the same time, Harvey takes wild narrative risks, introducing surprises it would be churlish to spoil—let’s just say that, after much talk of UFOs and alien intelligence, the startling giant figure who eventually confronts a tech billionaire is not something readers will see coming.

That scene’s a doozy, and Harvey’s inventiveness extends to cosmic alt-history, millennia-spanning conspiracies, futurology, untapped human potential, memorable tech-thriller action— a “plastic explosive bullet” shot from sunglasses!—and more. But it’s the ideas that drive this series. “Your species seems to have a death wish,” one mysterious personage tells a young Lama, which gets to the core of these books: Harvey spins a secret history of all of us, urging us to be more. (The novels are published out of narrative order and can be read independently of each other, though their connections are rewarding.)

Takeaway: This bold, brisk conspiratorial psychic thriller series imagines humanity’s secret history.

Great for fans of: Lindsay Ellis’s Axiom’s End, Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 12/2022
  • 978-0-918538-17-8
  • 212 pages
  • $14.99
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