Mills, Scott – The Masterplan

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The Masterplan

Well, if you’re looking for the opus from Scott Mills, I’d have to say this is it. This book is huge, somewhere around 300 pages (there are no page numbers and I’m not THAT dedicated to getting that exactly right). The story here is that it’s 2040 and a scientist is looking to fix the eventual death of the universe in trillions of years by throwing off the orbits of a few planets and creating his own event singularity. He gets an ex-wife and his estranged brother to witness his acts, but things go horribly wrong and they end up wandering the galaxy together, sleeping for billions of years at times to travel the necessary distances. The science of this seems sound, at least based on what little I know, and it’s a fascinating concept that’s done pretty well. Heck, there’s even a vengeful alien tracking them through space because of their accidental destruction of his world, so there’s even drama a’plenty. My only problem with this is that the people were a bit too unflappable, as they woke up at one point, 40,000 years in the future, and didn’t even stop to mention the fact that everybody and everything they ever knew was long dead. Things like that would have really humanized the story, making it maybe a bit more accessible to people who might be a bit turned off by the sheer science of the thing. I liked it, as I’m hopelessly biased towards his work and think the story more than made up for my quibbles, so that’s bottom line to this rambling. It has a cover price of $24.95 but I got it cheap through that Top Shelf Comix sale, so maybe it’s available elsewhere for a bit cheaper than that cover price, if you were willing to wander online a bit…