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Atlantis Gate | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Greg Donegan | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Atlantis | Atlantis, Bermuda Triangle, Devil's Sea, Atlantis Gate | ||
The battle against the powerful, enigmatic Shadow continues. This time, it is trying to tap into the power of the Eart's very core. The consequences are dire should it succeed: the entire planet will explode. Dane, Foreman, and the others fighting for humanity have little time to determine just how to stop it. The answer seems to lie in a map of sorts, according to a vision. But what is this map? And where? And just how is it supposed to be used, anyhow?
This series is not a bad bunch of thrillers. The stakes are high, the enemy vast, and the clock is ticking. It can give a real sense of tenstion to the stories. And I was quite pleased by how certain things were handled, as well. The public, for instance, is not left in the dark, with rediculous platitudes and explanations. The Shadow's assaults are simply too large to hide, and for once an author has the various governments be fairly up front about things. And the battle afainst the Shadow, and the mystery over what they are and what they're after, proceeds just a little bit farther every novel. Donegan also enjoys using very high tech equipment in certain roles, and so fans of technothrillers might enjoy this as well if they can cope with the supernatural aspects of the story.
Unfortunately, some of the science and other facts he quotes are just plain wrong. The world does not have a hot interior because of ancient meteorite impacts, to cite one of the more memorable errors. Only a few of these are actually relevant to the problem or its solution. Many are details in technobabble meant to give meaning or context to something else, and so a fix would have affected little of the plot.
But these are minor flaws, mere nits to pick. There are two more serious problems.
First, Donegan once again spans his adventure through time. One leg occurs in the besieged present day, and the other is in 480 BC, where King Leonidas of the Spartans is trying to defend Greece against King Xerxes' invading Persians. But there is very little drama in this long-ago story, for history is history. We know (or can easily find out) who won the battle, and history is not in any danger of being changed. It's barely relevant to the fight against the Shadow, too, the two stories crossing only briefly near the end. It is an attempt to make the struggle seem great and epic, spanning millenia. But the interaction with Shadow-related events is too small, making all those pages seem a waste. The author could well have just depicted the actual meeting of the two aspects with perhaps a few pages beforehand. Scores of pages leading up the event, spread out through the entire book, were just pointless. And the story could easily have been rethought to excude it altogether.
The other problem is that a great deal of information is passed to Dane via visions. This is a fine plot element to get a story rolling, as it was here, but should be used sparingly afterwards, as it is not. Visions tell Dane where to look for things, or what to look for, or of events going on outside his knowledge. He thus retrieves items and goes places with no real knowledge of what he is doing. Imagine if a bomb had to be defused, and the person to do it didn't know any electronics, knew nothing of how bombs were constructed, and didn't know where the pliers were. He gets all that information not through asking around and figuring things out, but thanks to mystic visions that come straight to his brain. Readers don't even get to see most of them; Dane merely says he had another one, and it would be a good idea to, say, go to Peru to check on something. It was, to say the least, rather disappointing.
Atlantis Gate isn't really a bad book. It's certainly not any worse than its predecessors. It got the worse grade largely because there's only so long I could excuse the time spanning elements and the growing role of mystic visions. I also found myself wondering when the characters would finally start getting enough information to actually do something. Earth is fighting a purely defensive battle, and by now, the fourth book, the characters should be starting to put things together so they can plan a counter. At the least, some of the deeper questions should be answered. But while some knowledge is gained, Donegan once again progresses the story in tiny increments.
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