Terrors of Pangaea

What do you do when you reach the end of all times?

Colonel Preston Lost is a man of many talents. One of the youngest to achieve the rank of colonel, Lost found himself unable to return to civilian life after the war. He was a man born at the wrong time. Chivalry was dead, and there were no more crusades or mighty deeds to be done.

Sport fishing and big game hunting became first a pastime, then an obsession, but the times were against him, and the nations outlawed such sport, as they did anything dangerous, rare, or worthy of manhood. Basically, anything he saw as “fun” or “challenging.” His aerospace plane had, at first, been merely another pastime.

And then he saw the unidentified flying object.

Lost didn’t think of himself as reckless. He believed in preparation, proper equipment, and patience in stalking the prey. But, in reality, he was not a cautious man. If he was, he wouldn’t have followed the spaceship into the black storm clouds above the Bermuda Triangle.

Now he’s at the end of time, having crash-landed on Pangaea Ultima with few supplies and no way of returning home. But Lost is a man of many talents, and anything should be possible for him. Or, is it possible that this time, Lost has met his match?

My Rating & Review:

For a while I’ve been searching for some good pulp fiction. I’ve been wanting an exciting adventure with an unapologetic hero. Not a brooding, contemplative person who aches over every life choice, where chapters are devoted to introspective blah blah garbage. I want a hero who charges forth with determination and resolution. If the choice is wrong, then they deal with it and move on. Always moving forward.

I found this hero in Preston Lost.

As his name implies, he is lost. Completely removed from the world he understands into another new and strange land where some physics and natural working order have been upended. This new world is full of mystery, inhabited by impossible peoples and tech. This sets Preston on a journey to unravel the mysteries of where he is. And along the way he searches for the role he has to play in it all.

It looks like this will be a trilogy, which is good because Wright can further develop some of his great ideas. One in particular that I like is how ‘advanced’ cultures rely on non-man made tech. In some impossible way, animals, bugs, the natural order, has become the preferred technology of many future races. The idea is very cool and Wright has plenty of room to build even more than he already has. I can’t wait to see what happens with it all, and what else can be discovered in Lost’s journey.

So if you’re looking for some good, pulpy sci-fi that hearkens back to sci-fi when sci-fi was fun, then look no further than John Wright’s Terrors of Pangaea series.