Pharoni by Colin Dodds

When the body of Harry Injurides - playwright, provocateur and bodybuilder - washes up on a beach, his friends are shocked, but not altogether surprised. But when they meet to mourn Harry, he shows up and says he's been resurrected.

Pharoni is the story of those friends. Tommy Pharoni tries to overcome his shock by writing about his friend's resurrection, and accidentally starts a religion. Roy Sudden starts a tech empire based on digital empathy and digital pain, drawing in billionaire investors, femme-fatale programmers, and tsunamis of capital. And, Roy's on-again, off-again girlfriend Maud works in secret to bring radical justice to the most neglected and abused corners of society.

As Tommy's religion grows, Roy and his backers try to take control of it. The battle, about more than doctrine, engulfs Tommy's marriage and threatens his life, leading to a conflict with strangely humane results that no one could predict.

Told in the first person, Pharoni has the feel of a memoir or a really long confession. Tommy Pharoni is a struggling screenplay writer who pays his bills and alimony by working a soulless marketing job. His closest friends were aspiring artists of different sorts in college. Now in their mid-thirties, they've set aside those aspirations to "adult" properly. All except for Harry, whose death opens the story. Harry struggled to fit into contemporary society, instead preferring to help the homeless while penning "words of wisdom" in his many notebooks. After his death and subsequent re-birth, those notebooks wound up in Tommy's possession. Ultimately, Tommy would collect them into a coherent manuscript and seek out a way to get them published.

As Tommy is a screenwriter, the format of the story periodically shifts into screenplay mode. This works particularly well for conversations as it affords opportunity to get to know the other characters through their dialogue rather than relying on Tommy's narrative. I wouldn't say Tommy is an unreliable narrator, but he does limit what we can learn about what's going on elsewhere with other characters. References to things that have been written elsewhere and NDAs force the reader to fill in the gaps.

After Harry's resurrection, the lives of Tommy and his friends change as described in the blurb, but there's so much more. The group of friends find themselves splattered by the seven deadly sins, fitting for a story where a religion is founded upon the philosophical musings of a character that has died and miraculously resurrected days later. At least Christianity didn't get partnered with a health and wellness brand. The corrupting influence of millions and billions of dollars seeps its way into their lives and rots them from within. What is friendship worth? Can you put a dollar amount on it?

If there's one overarching theme that I can take away from this tale, it's that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Keeping this spoiler free, I'll say that Tommy started out as a character that I could connect with to someone I didn't want anything to do with. But I stuck with him because act two opens with:

This is where I get unrelatable, maybe even unlikable. As the writer of failed screenplays, I know what a mortal sin unlikability can be.

That gave me hope for him in act three. But Tommy is far from the only person to be corrupted by power. It's everyone up to the very end of the story. And the only characters whose souls are left intact are those who never possess it.

Colin Dodds has crafted an excellent morality play with vivid characters. Pharoni offers modern day parallels to the founding of Christianity, right down to the Christmas star, but in an age of unbridled capitalism. If you're old enough, with all of the life experience that implies, it forces you to take a look at this fellowship of friends and how they sacrificed art and friendship for wealth and power and check to make sure that this isn't a mirror of your own life.

4 stars

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DED

A Sickness in Time by MF Thomas and Nicholas Thurkettle

Cover: A Sickness in Time

THE MOST DANGEROUS OPERATION

In 2038, the human race is in a death spiral, and most people do not even know it yet. Technology that was supposed to make us better and stronger instead is birthing a strange and terrible plague we may not be able to stop. When the young daughter of Josh Scribner, a wealthy tech entrepreneur, starts to succumb to the illness, he dedicates his fortune in a desperate effort to save her life. Working with a friend & celebrated physicist, Josh develops the ability to send objects back through time. Their goal to recruit an agent in the past who might change our fatal path.

In our present day, a broken and traumatized Air Force veteran finds a strange message in the woods, drawing her into an adventure spanning decades. All humanity is at stake, as she and her small group of friends become the unlikely heroes taking up the secret fight against our future doom.

MF Thomas and Nicholas Thurkettle, authors of the acclaimed sci-fi thriller, Seeing by Moonlight, are back with this time-twisting adventure that asks if our own destiny can be healed.

A Sickness in Time, by MF Thomas and Nicholas Thurkettle, is set in two time periods: one in the present day and one in 2039. It is a time travel plot with carefully defined limitations around what can be sent and how far back. The constraints are, of course, what makes the plot interesting. There can be no free-for-all in which the timeline gets increasingly muddied, but the various characters have to plan out very precisely what they intend to do. And the nearness of the two time periods—under twenty years—is very intriguing. There is no grandfather paradox here: the overlaps are much more immediate.

But before you reach the time travel elements of this story, and running along in parallel with it, is a plot dealing with the crossover between human and artificial intelligence. In this case, the artificial part takes the form of augments to human capability, rather than alternatives. The book's title refers to the discovery that the augments have a shadow side, the extent of which is largely unknown. They are not the unequivocal benefit first assumed, though puzzling out what the problems are takes a lot of time.

This story really worked for me. I liked the interplay between the different periods and the gradual alteration of the future line in response to successive changes. It's hard to tie up all the loose ends once you invoke time travel, but the authors do a convincing job. Inevitably, well before the halfway mark, you find yourself wondering how the tangle is going to resolve. Without giving anything away, the resolution had a clever twist. Every reader will—like me—wonder if that was the best choice to make, but it has certainly been done creatively.

There are two pairs of main characters, one pair in each of the two periods. But the pairs are contrasting in several ways rather than parallel. The authors do a good job of exploiting these contrasts. I found all four of the protagonists very credible, and quite individual.

In short, A Sickness in Time is well thought out, well planned, and well executed. If you like science fiction which doesn't just tell a story, but probes the difficult interface between scientific, social and ethical areas, this could be the book for you. I certainly really enjoyed it.

The book's website can be found here.