![\"empire](\"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/empire-of-the-ants-237x300.jpg\")
Not the cover, more’s the pity.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
Don\u2019t ask me why I decided to read an sf romance novel. I\u2019m nowhere near being the target audience. Maybe I missed the last line in the helpful burb that might have steered me clear; \u201cWith their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other\u2019s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance\u2026\u201d<\/i> Really, that should have done it. But even though I\u2019m not the audience, I\u2019m pretty sure there is one out there for this carapace-ripper of a chimeric-biotech romance fiction. And I respect that, sort of.<\/p>\n
Asha is one of a thousand or so survivors of a once proud people (genetically unmodified humans), now living in the city known as Sanctuary in the middle of the (Utah) desert whose boundaries are patrolled by their (chimeric mantis-human hybrid) conquerors. When her (computer hacker \/ archivist) father is taken by the enemy, she concocts a plan to follow him and do what she can (it gets muddy here) to save him. After having her memory wiped by hypnosis, she engineers her own capture by the enemy on patrol, who turns out to be their ruler\u2019s son, which makes him the prince, who immediately falls head-over-carapace for her. Of course he does. She\u2019s a twenty-something librarian from a small town in the Utah desert, which makes her totally hot. Well, totally con-hot at the very least.<\/p>\n
Mankind created a host of human-animal crossbreeds a generation or two before the story opens, the most successful of which are the manti, a cross between the praying mantis and homo sap. It\u2019s not clear that humanity actually tried to exterminate their creations, though they did round them up and dump them in Africa, which evidently pissed the bug-eyed-mansters off enough to wipe us off the face of the planet, with the exception of a small population in Sanctuary, and the few that didn\u2019t get caught. And why, exactly are they letting the human city of Sanctuary survive? Not out of the kindness of their chitinous little hearts, I assure you.<\/p>\n
Typical of many oppressed or formerly oppressed populations, the Manti work very hard to maintain their human characteristics. Their insect genes are dominant, so strict breeding control has to be maintained in order to keep the whole race from turning green and biting off each other\u2019s heads during sex. The only thing keeping the manti from going totally buggy is regular breeding with genetically pure humans. Mwah ha ha.<\/p>\n
Prince Pax\u00a0 isn\u2019t a bad guy. Sure, he\u2019s been brought up to think of humans as glorified cattle, or breeding stock, but like any post-apocalyptic-oppressor progeny he\u2019s come to think of them as almost human, or manti, as the case may be. Pax really wishes his hard-liner father would accept that there was room in the world for both races. The prince\u2019s bug-like characteristics are pretty much invisible, by the way, except for his green eyes, incredible musculature and well, this is a romance novel, so expect some notable tweaks here and there. What either is or isn\u2019t useful, depending on your point of view, is that some of the genetic tweaking in the manti leads to a very strong sex drive, one it would take a prince\u2019s honor to sublimate.<\/p>\n
Taken captive and without memory of how she went from archival researcher to girl on the run, Asha is whisked away by Pax in his AI controlled Scarab scoutship, and rather than heading back to bug central, like he\u2019s supposed to, he heads for somewhere quiet where he can find out how both he and Asha\u2019s memories are scrambled, and what to do about the whole biological mating drive thing.<\/p>\n
For her part, Asha is going through all sorts of prisoner psychology stuff, really anxious to escape on the one hand, and more than a little attracted to the prince on the other. When they stumble across a renegade collection of humans, Ash has to make up her mind which side she\u2019s on. Unlike the reader, she doesn\u2019t know her mind was made up the moment she saw Pax, and keeps stumbling over herself trying to figure things out.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the pair will confront their inter-species attraction, as well as the fate of both humans and manti, but not without fighting it at every turn.<\/p>\n
Time out for a little gratuitous etymology. No, not entomology, etymology.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to say a few words about the main character\u2019s names, which is technically Onomastics, but who\u2019s ever heard of that? First we\u2019ve got Asha, \u201cderived from Sanskrit (asha) meaning \u201cwish, desire, hope\u201d. Though I\u2019ve found references to \u201ctruth,\u201d as well. That\u2019s obscure enough to be clever. Prince Pax, on the other hand, translates all to easily as \u201cPrince of Peace,\u201d which fits all too well. Snug as a bug in a rug for a guy who\u2019d like us all to get along.<\/p>\n
As I said, it\u2019s not my cup of tea, and I can\u2019t get over the feeling that it the author had made it either an Arabian Nights sort of fantasy or a hard-core biotech tale it would have had more credibility, but as it is the book relies on postponing the protagonist\u2019s per-ordained passion to keep the plot going, and it\u2019s just not enough to do the job.
\n[tabbyending]<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
[tabby title=”First Tab”]
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/netgalley-covers\/cover42565-medium.png\")
<\/p>\n
Our world is no longer our own.\u00a0 We engineered a race of superior fighters–the Manti, mutant humans with insect-like abilities. Twenty-five years ago they all but destroyed us. In Sanctuary, some of us survive. Eking out our existence. Clinging to the past. Some of us intend to do more than survive. Asha and Pax\u2014strangers and enemies\u2014find themselves stranded together on the border of the last human city, neither with a memory of how they got there. Asha is an archivist working to preserve humanity\u2019s most valuable resource\u2014information\u2014viewed as the only means of resurrecting their society. Pax is Manti, his Scarab ship a menacing presence in the skies over Sanctuary, keeping the last dregs of humanity in check.But neither of them is really what they seem, and what humanity believes about the Manti is a lie. With their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other’s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance from Sharon Lynn Fisher, author of Ghost Planet
\n[tabby title=”Third Tab”]
\nJump sleep in the sink vestibulum climb the curtains attack, sleep on your face sniff attack your ankles etiam give me fish judging you. Sagittis run zzz jump elit nibh, sunbathe enim rip the couch vulputate accumsan.
\n[tabbyending]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[tabby title=”Second Tab”] Don\u2019t ask me why I decided to read an sf romance novel. I\u2019m nowhere near being the target audience. Maybe I missed the last line in the helpful burb that might have steered me clear; \u201cWith their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other\u2019s secrets and forge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3222"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3253,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3222\/revisions\/3253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}