Freeheads, by Kerry Nietz

Last summer I read books 1 & 2 of Kerry Nietz's DarkTrench saga, and loved them (see my reviews here and here).  Lucky me, about the time I was finishing those books, Nietz was finishing up book 3, so my wait was blessedly short for Freeheads.  In books 1 & 2, debuggers SandFly and HardCandy are sent to repair a robot on DarkTrench, an interstellar ship which has just returned from a voyage to Betelgeuse.  The robot, as well as the crew, had encountered a curious song from a star, which had transformed them. SandFly and HardCandy then take DarkTrench on a return journey to Betelgeuse where they encounter a seemingly idyllic but ultimately malicious alien race.  Freeheads opens with the pair returning to earth, in hopes of bringing the message of A~A³, Nietz's moniker for God, to people spiritually enslaved by a controlling Islamic regime.

Through a series of events driven by both divine intervention and sabotage, SandFly and HardCandy have to abandon DarkTrench, intending to head straight to earth, but end up on the moon.  There they discover a colony of exiles from earth and learn the source of the rogue stream they had briefly accessed on earth.  To their great surprise, they realize that due to a malfunction on DarkTrench, 40 years have passed since they left earth; to them, it had only been weeks.  Also to their surprise, the message of A~A³ and the superlative stream managed to make its way to earth via the original DarkTrench crew.  However, the fledgling group of followers of the message have been persecuted and nearly eliminated.

Things had changed on earth during their absence.  Before they left, everyone lived under religious oppression, but that oppression had progressively become widespread slavery.  SandFly returning after 40 years to confront the leaders and lead the people out of slavery?  Any Biblical allusions you might imagine here are certainly no accident. 

Nietz has a spiritual message in Freeheads, not in the sense that he preaches, and certainly not in a way that deters from the story.  In fact, that's part of the fun of the whole DarkTrench series: In a world in which Christianity has been effectively quashed by world-dominating Islam, what would it look like to reintroduce the gospel?  Nietz gives us a warning to heed.  Sandfly's theory as to why the message of the Bible "just faded out": "Those who knew the Truth got lazy, or worse, refused to share what they knew. . . .They cloistered.  Failed to do something when they had a chance."  Sobering words for a Christian culture that sometimes seems to make itself irrelevant to the wider world. . . .

Besides a great story and a compelling spiritual message, Nietz handles the science well.  Freeheads is chock full of speculative technology, but Nietz, not satisfied with simply throwing out crazy devices or giving people and machines unfounded superpowers, gives enough description and background to make the technology almost believable.  He's no stranger to natural science either; his descriptions of a close encounter with a comet and a walk on the moon's surface are quite convincing as well.

With his DarkTrench saga, Nietz shows his skill as a captivating writer, adept at conveying a fast-moving story with thoughtful spiritual reflection and an imaginative view of the near future.  The three books can certainly be read and enjoyed independently, but they're best taken as a whole, showing both SandFly's development as well as Nietz's development as a writer.  He's got a few more books to write before he enters the pantheon of sc-fi greats, but I do like Tim George's blurb from the back cover of Freeheads: "Nietz writes in a way that makes me wonder what the masters of the genre like Asimov and Heinlein might have written had they known A~A³."  Well-said.  I'm already wondering what Nietz will come up with next!