Evolution’s Child

Evolution’s Child
Charles Lee Lesher
Writers Cramp Publishers
ISBN: 978-0-9777235-0-8
Fiction, Science Fiction
Reviewed by Chris Gerrib

Charles Lee Lesher’s new book Evolution’s Child recently crossed my desk. It’s an interesting book, although I’m not sure I can fully endorse it.
The book is set in the year 2092. Earth, thanks to global warming, is a mess, and its 13 billion inhabitants are struggling to survive. Orbital solar power and room temperature superconductors, both provided from Earth’s moon, are the critical factors for this survival. Lazarus Sheffield, an analyst in the North American Federation’s Department of Homeland Security, decides to defect from the Christian fundamentalist hell that is the NAF, and runs to the Moon. When he gets there, he uses his analysis skills to attempt to convince them that a massive assault by the Islamic Brotherhood is in final preparation.
Lesher’s book is very exciting, and the world he creates is interesting, even if you wouldn’t want to visit it. Having said that, there are problems with the book which lead me to give it less then a ringing endorsement. First, I find Lesher’s writing style rather verbose. For example, Lazarus, on the run in the Athens, Greece airport, steps into a men’s room to change clothes, thus throwing off surveillance. Lesher spends a page on describing the change-over, where a paragraph will do. Further on, we get another two pages on the operation of a zero-gee bathroom, again something that could have been glossed over.
My second problem is that Lesher, like all authors, is enamored of his research. At one point, the entire narrative stops for a five page technical document providing the history of one of the critical pieces of technology used in the story. It’s something that the author needs to know, and if it was put in an appendix at the end it might be interesting, but I felt the placement of this document just stopped the flow of the story.
I should point out that there are several gunfights in the later stages of this book, described with great amounts of gore. It didn’t bother me, but some more sensitive readers may be upset by that.
Evolution’s Child is book one of a series, and the ending is a cliffhanger. It’s an exciting cliff to hang from, and the story, especially in the last eighty or so pages, really picks up, but I found that getting there was a bit of a slugfest. If I had to assign a numerical rating to Evolution’s Child, I’d give it a six out of ten- interesting but flawed.