The Blueprint
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4,3 • 3 beoordelingen
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- € 4,49
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- € 4,49
Beschrijving uitgever
The Blueprint is a philosophical thriller about our dark, distant future, stranded on an unknown world, entangled in a brutal war against our primordial nature and against an alien, hostile life form, struggling on the brink of extinction. The story shows from different perspectives the restless and compulsive search of the main characters for a life force of unknown origin, locked in fossilized fragments: the Blueprint. One of the first readers describes well what kind of book it is: The Blueprint is a dizzying road trip through the consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinating, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of orgasmic mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels. The Blueprint takes the reader on an intriguing quest and a ruthless battle with a fossilized alien life force that has not yet lost its dark and destructive powers. This quest and struggle gives the book's main characters, the Travelers, a grand and compelling life, in which they are torn between hope and fear, love and hate, friendship and alienation, victory and defeat.
People seeking for Blueprint fragments are called Travelers. None of the Travelers knows where the Blueprint came from, why it stranded on their world, and what caused it to split into six zones and shatter into thousands of encapsulated fragments. But every Traveler who ever comes into contact with the Blueprint has been captivated to the end of his days by an unreasonable search for the Blueprint and an unbearable desire to reunite all its fragments. Centuries ago, the first finder found the very first fragment of the Blueprint, a fossilized black egg the size of a human skull, at a depth of miles, in the strata beneath the foundations of the compressed tunnels that undercut all continents and oceans. Since his discovery, the first finder has been a-mortal, driven by an unbearable desire to find and reunite all the fragments, without being able to identify where this will lead.
Centuries ago the a-mortal Ralen discovered the first fragment of the Blueprint. Due to his unnaturally long lifespan, Ralen has forgotten that he is the legendary first finder. In the course of the story, when he reads archives in which Travelers have recorded their oldest memories, Ralen rediscovers that he is the first finder. Ralen comes from another world, but that too is a black hole in his memory. During his quests across and underneath continents and oceans, he occasionally experiences flashbacks of this bitterly lonely journey through the forbidden void, reminding him that an unknown enemy from afar is on the way to this world. These are rare moments in which Ralen realizes rationally why the Blueprint should be reunited at all costs. It is the only means that can keep mankind from extinction. Together with Casten, his only reliable ally, Ralen tries to forge the warring Travelers into a united tribe in order to reunite the fragments in time. Ralen's character does not cooperate in this. By nature he is a restless solitary hunter, who prefers to retreat to the jungles. But every time he gives in to that desire, the call of the Blueprint catches up with him and forces him back to the endless tunnels, in search of the last undiscovered fragments and the underground archives in which the excavated fragments lie.
Klantrecensies
Intriguing future thriller
The Blueprint is a dizzying road trip through the consciousness and cosmos of Ralen, the main character. In the false world in search of truthfulness, freedom and happiness. A world in which Huxley's Soma world fades into a cozy tea party. Hallucinating, without mescaline or alcohol, like Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. But with a kind of orgasmic mysticism and a penchant for brutal violence. An intelligent contemporary Easy Rider. A must read for anyone fed up with the psychobabble and micro-stuff of most novels.
An intriguing, addictive, fascinating, philosophical, ambitious and innovative science fiction debut that certainly doesn't belong to the 13 in a dozen category! It has been a long time since I was so impressed by a debut book. When I started, I had my doubts, because it turned out to be a book written in the "I" form and that is generally not my favorite writing style. But the fluent writing style and the oppressively realistic world in which the story takes place quickly removed this objection. The book gets a hold of you and you want to know if Ralen is achieving his goal: understanding the Blueprint.
We live in a world that seems self-evident. Very few people are still looking for answers to the important questions. Now every important question has many answers. That means that real questioners are much rarer than people looking for answers. I appreciate the Blueprint so much, because the protagonist is one of those rare and authentic questioners. He is leading us into the dark, so to speak. He takes the characters from his world, but also his readers, that is to say, us, on an exciting and always surprising quest. As a publisher, and also as a reader, I too rarely have the pleasure of reading a work that has been successful on many levels. The Blueprint is such an exception, from above ground to deep in the tunnels. It offers as much adventure and excitement as a future novel that classic science fiction master A.E. Van Vogt could have written. It takes the readers by the throat, with a rich variety of characters who have their own answer to the Blueprint; oppressive, unsettling answers. But above all, we empathize so intensely with a real questioner that we, in our own aboveground existence, may be more inclined to ask questions ourselves.