I don't often read more serious sci-fi , or maybe I can better describe it as everyday style stories but with better tech. I don't care for inspectors, or life struggles unless you can shoot magic out your boring secretary twinkle toes or have at least two swords and a body count. Given those swords contain a demented baby demon and you mistook "I want milk" for "kill the heretics".
So I like more epic and fantastical things.
The Gaia Connection walks that line between mundane everyday persons' stories and magical.
It starts off rather slow following Mason, and oddly he is a masoners son. You don't often find such an unimaginitive setup unless you watch the news.
However Mason will not be going into the family business. Shocker right? But it gets better.
He wants to find "The Link" , it only takes about 50 pages to get to this point. From those pages I can tell you that Mason really tried to lay bricks but he sucked at it hard. Pretty much a lazy ass for like 4 chapters straight. The first time he turned up to work on time was the day he quit.
His dad was very relieved but had to put on a sad show. Really Those 50 pages could be their own book, title it "How to pretend you like your children."
As he gallops down the road, you finally find out why "advanced technology" like cars and things have been absent from the story, which explains why Mason never set an alarm to be on time but instead had a bellflower ring, but since the flower was blue it hardly ever felt like doing anything. Being blue and all? Get it?
So Gaia has over the centuries and millennia, very long time, fused with what tech humanity had. The humans like Mason were from a group who saw the collapse of civilization as we know and ten times worse. "Ten times worse" the book says explicitly, so like finally hover boards I think. Maybe like "The 5th Element", anyway, for a long time Gaia kept this group safe and isolated from the rest of the planet, which to be fair was more a city than a group if there are over a million people mucking about now.
So not to give too much away, but Gaia has absorbed all the old tech and become a lot more aware than it use to be. Consider a rock, now consider a rock that wakes you up so you can go skipping it on the pond, no matter how many times you explain it is just too heavy and maybe needs to get tumbled a bit like the other rocks.
"The Link" is a gift that some humans possess that allows them to control aspects of Gaia, which sometimes means using it as a fridge and making snow when you need to keep some meat cold till the weekend.
The only technology interface these people have is through Gaia, in the many forms this may take.
Not to spoil it but one of these natural born Link bearers recently discovered that Jupiter is pretty sick of covering for Earth a.k.a Gaia and has assured Jupiter that it would just be a little longer. Give or take a millennia then it can let all the asteroids go right through.
They also thought to just move Gaia to somewhere else but quickly abandoned that plan since the Universe pretty much hates the colour green.
Apart from being born with the ability to Link there is another way, and so getting through the next 100 pages of back story is crucial for you to find out what happens when Mason hits the junction and begins his journey.
I do hope someone writes this book oneday.
