Mercury Rising
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4.1 • 17 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Top Gun in space!
An alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty
The year is 1975 – Robert Oppenheimer has invented the Atomic Engine, the first human has walked on the moon, and Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven have sacrificed their lives to stop alien invaders.
Brooklyn, however, just wants to keep his head down, pay his mother’s rent, earn a little scratch of his own, and maybe get laid sometime. Simple pleasures! But life is about to get real complicated when a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes sets him up for murder.
So, his choices are limited – rot away in prison or sign up to defend the planet from the assholes who dropped a meteorite on Cleveland. Brooklyn crosses his fingers and picks the Earth Orbital Forces, believing that after a few years in the trenches – assuming he survives – he can get his life back. Unfortunately, the universe has other plans.
Brooklyn is launched into a quest to save humanity, find his true family, and grow as a person – while simultaneously coping with high-stakes space battles, mystery science experiments and the realisation that the true enemies perhaps aren’t the tentacled monsters on the recruitment poster… Or are they?
File Under: Science Fiction [ Little Green Men | Injection | Below the Crust | The Truth is out There ]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greene (The Light Years) remixes sci-fi conventions into a wild, satisfying adventure in a nearly picaresque vein. In an alternate 1961 where space technology has advanced more rapidly, American and Soviet forces narrowly repel an alien attack force. Fourteen years later, petty criminal Brooklyn Lamontagne avoids a lengthy prison sentence by enlisting for a full tour with the Extra-Orbital Forces. In basic training, he befriends Tommy, a gay Oklahoman, and Dee, a member of the Black Panther Party, before being assigned to the moon as a computer tech. After a year of crisscrossing the lunar outposts, he joins the mostly gay crew of a ship where a doctor uses experimental treatments to give Brooklyn greater strength and superhuman healing abilities. After the doctor tries to kill him, Brooklyn wakes up in a strange, underground shanty town the fellow human residents claim is deep under Venus's surface. Their hardscrabble existence begins to make more sense when a hyper-literal "designed" being arrives claiming to be an ambassador between aliens and humans, setting into action the unexpected conclusion. Each setting change brings new curveballs that confound predictions, and the separate episodes eventually build into one another, creating a genre-bending romp. Readers willing to roll with the punches will delight in following Greene's winding path.
