Saunter up the ramp of the Sereni — um, that is Sparrow and join Captain Mal–thew Cole on an old west, er, Sci-Fi adventure!
After Moses by Michael F. Kane is available in eBook and Print from Amazon. See the whole series on his website: https://michaelfkane.com/
Michael F. Kane takes the genre tropes of Sci-fi and Western and stews them together into something uniquely special and comfortable as an old pair of boots.
Matthew Cole is the stranger just rode into town, the last good man with a past just trying to scratch by… you know the setup. Like Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World, Michael F. Kane opens his sprawling series in the familiar. You don’t need much information to have a sense of Cole as a man because you’ve seen him. Cole is struggling to survive as a freelancer roaming our solar system after a total societal collapse brought on by a renegade AI. The twist is: the AI was saving humanity, and it’s departure has left us on our last legs.
Whether he’s racing through bustling markets to in a race to win a prize, or rescuing a slave from a violent drug cartel, Matthew Cole is a virtuous, though flawed, hero. He struggles to live his moral convictions in a world without them.
The story is highly episodic. So much so, that I started to wonder where the book was headed. Don’t get me wrong, this is a page turner. I always wanted to know what was going to happen next, even when I questioned whether there was any connection to the adventures Cole and his crew were experiencing. And those adventures are a fun homage to adventures you know and love. From Oliver Twist to Alien, it’s all here wrapped in a thin veneer of Star Wars meets Firefly. There’s even a robbery on a high speed train zipping across the surface of Mars. The episodes are entertaining and naturally draw the reader from one to the next — and yes, they do slowly build to a cohesive whole as the book marches along.
This book is so much more than a homage, though. Kane’s world takes on depth, richness, and hope even in a setting where mankind is barreling toward extinction. It’s entertaining and beautiful. Each chapter begins with a fragment of writing, the story of someone who has passed, telling their “After Moses” story. I won’t spoil that with too much explanation. However, each one is interesting and engaging. It could so easily have been pace breaking exposition, but Kane managed to craft fascinating and informative nuggets to draw the reader deeper into his solar system.
This book is not perfect. There are some small editorial flaws. They are really minor in this book, though. The worst offender I can recall was a few cases where my copy lacked an opening quotation mark on some dialog. While that can occasionally lead to confusion about what is said and what isn’t, it’s a pretty small mark on an otherwise beautiful novel.
Another minor quibble is Kane’s future where Rome is very important and the rest of Christendom is nearly nonexistent. I think any fair look at church history over the last two thousand years posits a future with more branches of the faith, not less. Maybe that gets addressed in later books in the series? Again, though, this is such a minor speed bump, it hardly merits a mention.
This one is a gem. A rare indie book that tells a fascinating story full of surprises, hope and real life struggle, neatly packaged and well edited. The whole here is greater than the sum of it’s parts, and that makes it tough to fully capture it in a few paragraphs. I loved this book. It filled me with nostalgia for my childhood, while giving me a cathartic space for some of the tragedy in my own life. I highly recommend it. Michael F. Kane is a talented writer and storyteller who has created a rich and interesting solar system. I’ll definitely be picking up the next book in the series.