For a million years, the human population was less than 26,000 people. By the year 2060, ten billion individuals crowded the planet.
As humanity faced its greatest challenge, two global corporations merge to deliver a radical solution: the construction of concentric spheres encircling the planet. For almost a thousand years the new world was astonishingly empty, but as the tionsphere approaches capacity, its universal processing service starts to fail, threatening the lives of the obsessively-connected people.
Caitlyn and her small team of contract theorists accept the impossible task of understanding why. They discover individuals who seemingly pre-date the tionsphere, including one who plans to destroy everything within Tion’s spheres. Pazel is intent on killing thousands of billions of people to preserve an elite population tailored to his own desires.
Set on an immense scale, ‘Tionsphere’ discovers ordinary workers surviving in a world overflowing with people distracted by their technology and threatened by a life without it.
Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite
Tionsphere is a work of science fiction penned by author J.C. Gemmell and is the opening novel to a new series. In this newly imagined future, the planet is faced with the inevitable crush of overpopulation and considers the ways in which human society might adapt to control this issue as time marches on. We follow the coming of age experiences of the teenage protagonist amid a wide cast of characters investigating the various unusual goings-on in the system they live by. But when one figure slips away from the assignment set for his future, new discoveries are made that threaten the system and human life as a whole.
Author J.C. Gemmell has produced a hard-boiled science fiction work for fans of traditional complex societies with lots of crunch in the workings and plenty of detailed backstories. Suitable for all readers due to its non-graphic depictions, the ensemble cast and various narrative viewpoints give us a full sense of the world in which we find ourselves, and the system put in place to promote segregation and prevent chaos from taking over in a society on the brink of overflow. The tension is palpable, the dialogue complex and the artifice of life itself intelligently exposed by those who break the chain. For serious science fiction fans, Tionsphere marks the beginning of a complex new series with plenty to think about long after the intense reading experience is over, and it’s therefore highly recommended for hardcore fans of the genre.
