Looking for an epic sci-fi adventure? The Lost Ship delivers.
TL;DR: A thought-provoking sci-fi pageturner, THE LOST SHIP twists and turns through a cloak-and-dagger plot to take down The Powers That Be against the backdrop of a post-invasion dystopia before culminating with a supernatural revelation in the heart of the Amazon.
Let’s face the facts. Trusting your gut and committing to a new author is risky.
Like that proverbial box of chocolates, “You never know what you’re going to get.”
Risk is an inherent part of venturing into uncharted territory. Everything from the mundanities of everyday life, like taste-testing a new ice cream flavor or choosing your outfit du jour, to life-altering decisions such as committing to a new relationship or uprooting your life and accepting a job proposal and leaving your comfortable world behind. Let’s face it, our lives are a continuous stream of risk-reward propositions predicated on an endless series of binary choices. Either do it, consequences be damned, and reap the potential reward. Or pass it by, never knowing what might have been.
Committing to a new book is no exception. Books are tough. Not only are you spending hard-earned money, but you are also investing precious time. Time is money. It better be good. How will you know? Trust the critics? Are they ever wrong? Perish the thought. How about throwing caution to the wind? Life is short. You need a new adventure with heart and soul. Jump in with both feet and embrace the thrill of discovering a new book obsession. To wit, I give you The Lost Ship, Book Two in The Powers That Be trilogy.
Now I know what you are thinking. Book Two? Would it be better to start with Book One? Of course it would. You can read about it in vivid detail here. Not to mention the discounts throughout my Shop. But I digress.
While the overarching theme of humankind’s place in a crowded universe applies to all three novels in The Powers That Be trilogy with an emotional pay-off at the climactic ending of Book Three that will put a lump in your throat and leave you breathlessly awaiting what’s next (stay tuned), for this essay, I will narrow the focus on the characters, conflicts, and changes inside Book Two, The Lost Ship.
The Lost Ship: Character, Conflict, and Change
The Characters: A Compelling and Dimensional Cast
Here are quick author sketches, quoteable excerpts, and descriptions for a cross-section of The Lost Ship’s expansive cast:
Rachel and Owen Haig
Number 1 stands and straightens her lab coat, “Follow me.”
Owen smiles, “With pleasure.”
Rachel elbows her clueless husband, “Down boy, she’s not human.”
“Damn. Really? How can you tell?”
“It is one of my superpowers.”
– Rachel and Owen Haig
We find Rachel and Owen Haig, the intrepid couple introduced in The Golden Ellipse, convalescing from terrible injuries in a decimated Cairo hospital, contending with unwanted notoriety and an offer to join The Powers That Be (PTB). The unsolicited proposal from the compromised clandestine organization shakes the young couple’s innate chemistry, revealing cracks in their relationship that will widen over time to a heartbreakingly emotional revelation, manifesting in a cerulean glow by the story’s final pages.
Rachel and Owen are the roots from which everything else in my story grows and branches outward—like an extended family tree. Their daughter Hannah takes center stage in Book Three, The Blue Spark. I will save my thoughts on the third novel for a future blog post.
Artemus Pennywell
“Sorry is for losers, Vita, and never mind.”
– Artemus Pennywell
Ageless CEO of The Powers That Be
The opening chapters of The Lost Ship dive deep beneath the Scottish Lowlands countryside into the PTB’s labyrinthine multi-level underground headquarters. Readers reconnect with the ageless and enigmatic CEO Artemus Pennywell and his über-replicant valet and fixer, Andrew, monitoring the 300-year-old organization’s stretched-thin tentacles, dispatching relief assets into the post-invasion dystopia. Entrusting the PTB’s vast network to do its job, Pennywell’s grim reality shifts to the next looming threats—both human and alien—cognizant that a planet-killing weapon on a prehistoric alien shipwreck lost in the heart of the Amazon jungle holds the key to humanity’s ultimate fate.
Spoiler Alert: Only Artemus Pennywell knows that exposure to a long-extinct prehistoric virus preserved within the alien shipwreck’s worldkiller payload will trigger the final phase of Rachel’s evolutionary Blue Spark transformation. Moreover, he knows the daughter she bears will be the first of a new kind. Thus fulfilling the PTB’s ultimate mission, fostering humankind to an Omega Point.
Professor Richard King
“I quit years ago, but since death is an abstraction, why not?”
– Prof. Richard King
aka Doc in Lost Cactus in the Lost Cactus universe
Brilliantly eccentric Professor Richard King, formerly known as Doc, spearheads plans to launch a second shipwreck expedition after learning the PTB’s initial Amazon foray likely ended in the death of Professor John Stevens, who went dark weeks before the invasion. Fuming at Pennywell’s lack of candor, King plans a second Amazon expedition from deep inside his gleaming subterranean laboratory with the more than capable assistance of The Sisters.
The Sisters are sixteen beautiful and intelligent identical replicants of a woman named Sarah.
Pembroke
“Believe it or not, I was a security officer at Paris Disneyland. Jesus, that was demeaning. However, I know where all the bodies are buried. Easy money, though. Easy money.”
– Pembroke
Burnt-out Mercenary-for-Hire
Burnt-out PTB mercenary-for-hire Pembroke assembles a veteran crew to guide Professor Richard King, along with newly commissioned PTB agents, Rachel and Owen Haig, on a do-or-die expedition spiraling into the heart of the Amazon jungle in a deadly race to beat the evil Empire Grays and Griffin Pike’s squad of cutthroat killers to the alien shipwreck. Trekking through the dense green inferno, the exhausted, wet, and dirty PTB team encounters prehistoric creatures that should not exist before coming face to face with an uncontacted cannibal tribe, the Forest Ghosts.
Forest Ghosts—a mythical tribe with a bloodthirsty reputation, haunt the rainforest, slathered in white clay—guardians of the lost ship.
Griffin Pike
“I am running out of time and patience. Let’s get this shitstorm in gear.”
– Griffin Pike
Tech Mogul and Founder of SatSTAR
With the world’s governments in tatters, tech mogul Griffin Pike conspires to dethrone the lone entity standing between himself and global hegemony, The Powers That Be. A suave and sophisticated psychopath, Pike convinces compromised leaders to convene a sham international trial, indicting the PTB for failing to use their extraterrestrial connections to thwart the aborted Gork invasion that brought the world to its knees.
In tandem with his megalomaniacal scheme, Pike maneuvers chess pieces in a cloak-and-dagger bid to steal back his late ancestor’s notebook that contains a secret clue to finding the legendary alien shipwreck and its apocalyptic payload as his failsafe option.
If he can’t rule the world, then neither will anyone else.
Nina Madsen
“So, what is this? Am I hallucinating? Or perhaps I am dead, and purgatory is an eternity waiting for a table at Le Cinq.”
– Nina Madsen
Administrator – The Powers That Be
Elegant and sophisticated PTB Administrator, Nina Madsen, accompanies pilots Nicole Weiss and Astrid Brown on a mercy mission to ferry a badly-injured Agent Flynn to a PTB lunar medical base where his new lab-grown liver awaits. However, as with most things in The Lost Ship, things go sideways fast. Lurking in the Solar System, a new alien threat known as the Empire Grays—a time-traveling telekinetic Gray alien race—hijacks the mission, imprisoning them inside a nightmarish hell amid dozens of terrified abductees from all over the world.
Could a diminutive Gray jailer hold the key to their escape?
Empire Gray Ship Captain
“You are making a mistake, Governor. We are all going to die here.”
– Empire Gray ship captain
Setting into motion the imaginatively compelling predicate for The Lost Ship, the novel’s Prologue opens 90 million years ago with the imperialistic Gray race’s arrival on a Mid-Cretaceous era Earth. Intent on dominating the resource-rich planet, they colonize a paleogeographic strip of shoreline along the Gondwana supercontinent only to have their supremacy shattered by rampaging, voracious dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. Finally admitting ignominious defeat, they abandon their colony in a calamitous retreat. In one last vile attempt at retribution, they load a world-killing weapon on the last ship to vacate Earth, but the compromised vessel never reaches altitude and crashes with its payload intact, the lost ship.
The vengeful Grays now seek to recover their shipwreck lost on a supercontinent that no longer exists..
* * *
Conflict: Intertwining Plots that Collide at the Heartstopping Climax
The Lost Ship begins with the day-after chaos, carnage, and confusion following THE GOLDEN ELLIPSE, immersing readers in the smoke and ashes of the former AI-driven civilization reduced to stone-age analog tech with the world’s collective knowledge evaporated into the ether from a cloud that no longer exists.
The story deftly steers readers through multiple parallel narrative conflicts from Rachel and Owen’s emotional recoveries, suffering mental wounds that will not fade away, to Pennywell and his perspicacious cadre of overachievers known as the PTB Council, dispatched to the Hague to match wits with Pike’s desperate international tribunal. Meanwhile, Flynn and Nina endure torturous, anguished incarceration inside the dank and eerie bowels of an Empire Gray battlecruiser overloaded with human abductees awaiting gut-churning fates at the four-fingered hands of their malevolent alien tormenters. And far below the bucolic Scottish countryside within the labyrinthine PTB headquarters, a revelatory coupling foreshadows an accelerating convergence of humans and replicants inside Andrew’s private suite.
Following the cloak-and-dagger intrigue and deeply emotional storytelling that encompass the first half of The Lost Ship, the saga ventures below the Equator into the heart of the Amazon where the PTB expedition’s jungle trek meets danger around every bend in the river and behind every moss-covered tree before a final series of twists and turns lead to the otherworldly floor of a precipitous rift lost to time where a supernatural revelation illuminates humankind’s transformative destiny in a cerulean glow.
* * *
Change: Vivid and Cinematic
Against the sweeping backdrop of a world suffering a collective digital withdrawal worse than heroin, The Lost Ship’s intertwining plots advance at a steady rhythm in vivid detail:
Here are a few representative excerpts:
“Artemus Pennywell stares outside the armored vehicle’s dark-tinted backseat window at the logjam of garbage, debris, and bodies collecting against the mangled steel girders of the collapsed London Eye jutting from the mud-brown river …”
“Civilizational ashes swirl and scatter across the cracked macadam, piling against the pipe and drape riser as well-healed leaders backslap and glad-hand, feigning normalcy like another G8.”
“Parting a thick mass of leaves and vines, he points out an odd little man in a shiny suit, waist-deep and back-turned in a fast-flowing stream, a stone’s throw from the top of a precipitous waterfall into a steep and treacherous rift valley, off-limits and lost to time.”
“Griffin Pike strides through darkness, keeping pace with a tall Frenchwoman, lighting the path forward with a torch jutting from under a blood-red cape over camouflage fatigues and army-surplus boots.”
“Nightfall in the rainforest amplifies the chirps, hoots, grunts, squawks, and growls, thrashing and crashing through dense jungle undergrowth, punctuated by the haunting screams and wails of the hunted rising above the din before falling to silence.”
… a character quips, “We just went from Star Wars to Indiana Jones in a heartbeat,” and this description aptly summarizes what readers can expect as they make their way through this adventure tale.
— KIRKUS REVIEWS
Indeed, the search for a new and original science fiction story that entertains while making you think and leaves a lasting impression deep within your psyche is a rarity. It’s like hacking through a dense jungle for days and weeks until finally stumbling upon your prize: that uncommon novel that meets your sweaty gaze with a tantalizing cover inviting you to embark on an uncompromising reading experience within the pages of The Lost Ship.
* * *
The Powers That Be trilogy
While all three sci-fi novels read as standalone books, for the most fulfilling and engaging experience, the author recommends starting with The Golden Ellipse, and then proceeding to The Lost Ship, and finally, to The Blue Spark—the climactic final chapter in the saga of humankind’s ultimate destiny in a crowded universe. Upon reading the last line with your heart throbbing and lump in your throat, you’ll be beyond curious as to What’s Next.
Read The Powers That Be trilogy.
What The Lost Ship Offers Readers
Sci-fi action-adventure in the veins of Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones films, along with epic page-turners like Dune by Frank Herbert and The Expanse by James S.A. Corey.
An emotional connection to a diverse cast of dimensional and relatable characters, expansive globe-trotting settings, interwoven plotlines, and flashbacks.
An easy-to-read, well-designed 616-page novel in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats—all available at a discounted price on johnhopkinsauthor.com.
A frontmatter section of the author’s original concept illustrations.
Epigraphs of the author’s favorite literary voices and iconic figures grace each chapter’s opening page.
An extensive bibliography for studying the novel’s numerous details, from incidental to paramount.
The Author / Casting Director
I’m not sure how common this is among authors, but I cast every character in my head before adding them into the narrative, starting way back with protagonists Rachel and Owen. I chalk this up to my background in visual arts. Hence, while my characters are totally of my own imagination, from a visual standpoint, I draw inspiration from a variety of sources (no AI). Hence, the subtle to downright overt familiarity in some of my character sketches.
Once again, I’d love your thoughts.
Which actors would you cast as Rachel and Owen Haig? How about Andrew? Or Professor Richard King? Or all 16 Sisters? Let me know in the comments. The first ten people to Sign-up and reply with their choices—no matter how crazy—will receive a FREE GIFT.
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👉 Join my list of insiders and receive an additional 15% off a digital download of The Lost Ship. Prefer a physical copy? The paperback and hardcover are also on sale using the links on my site. They look great on the bookshelf and make the perfect gift for sci-fi fans.
