Wendy O’Hanlon – Acres Australia

This book is out-of-this-world – literally! Retired jack-of-all-trades, Tony Green, mused for years over this fictional book and in that time created fantastical worlds and characters that are worlds away from our everyday lives. And this book takes millions of years in the telling.

Imaginative and well-crafted, this solid science-fantasy escape would prove a great read for the younger reader and youth audience.

The author’s own concerns about sustaining our planet are reflected in this story that begins on the much-depleted planet, Zula, situated in a faraway galaxy. A giant space station called Haven is constructed to save some of the planet’s most skilled citizens so that they may find and populate another planet.

On board Haven another space station, called Ark, was being built. Also on board were 11 children who had been born and raised on the space station and one native boy who had been rescued from the ailing planet. This novel is the story of these children as they explore the galaxies to find a liveable planet and thus continue their civilisation. Their journey begins when they are herded to the Ark when the mother-station Haven is under attack.

The children and their 18-year-old Space Cadet leader, Adam, put themselves into sleeping cocoons which allow for space travel without aging, but with sustenance. They awaken 20 million years later in the Milky Way galaxy with a long-ago message from the parent ship telling them that their parents thwarted the attack and for the Ark to find a liveable planet.

Also on board is a strange female creature that appears only to teenage Noah in mind and vision and was the one who warned the Haven crew of the initial attack. Noah calls this creature ‘Leaffe, the Defender of the Genes’. She exists in a chest that was given to Noah for his birthday before he hurriedly left Haven.

It is Leaffe who masterminds the complete evolution of a new planet while the young Ark crew ‘sleep’ for millions of years. The planet is very similar to a young Earth. The Ark crew has many adventures as they explore the new planet after ‘sleeping’ through certain periods of evolution. It’s like a bird’s eye view of Earth’s evolution.

They eventually meet up with cavemen who believe they are great spirits from the sky. It is from this meeting that the plot thickens and the author’s true intentions are revealed. This is a clever take on the theory of evolution.