Jack Skillingstead

Olivia Nikitas, a hardened investigation journalist reporting on the long civil war in Syria (the story takes place in 2029), has just had her lover die in her arms. She was tracking down a story and let Brian tag along. Moments after his death however, she has some sort of psychic breakdown, and finds that Brian is alive. Injured, but very much alive.

Back home in Seattle, they try to start a life together. She is afraid of commitment, really, of letting anyone into her life, while he is show more very trusting and open. It doesn't sound like a match made in heaven but it seems to be working. Then the world starts to fall apart. A weaponized version of smallpox has been released into the world.

Olivia soon learns that she is accidentally in possession of a technology that allows her to change some past event to change the present. How this happens sort of makes sense but I can't go into it as it would be too much of a spoiler. This is why Brian isn't dead. Did her action lead to the smallpox crisis? Can she fix it and still keep Brian alive.

This is a book of choices. The choices a woman can make while trying to save her lover and the world.

Olivia is a difficult person to get close to. She strong and willful but very insecure. Her parents died while she was young and she has never been able to get over the sense that she was deserted by them. It's why today it's so difficult for her to accept Brian, because she's sure he will eventually desert her too.

She doesn't want this new power she has but she has to make the choice. Save Brian now or save the world for later.

The world of 2029 is frightening. It seems a lot like 2019 but with some interesting overlays. That the war in Syria is still raging is plausible. The everyday technology in use is also plausible. The thing I liked best is 3D cell phones. Your phone can, for example, project a 3 dimensional image of the person you're talking to.

I very much liked this book and will be looking for Jack Skillingstead's other works. show less

I have to admit to my general disinterest in tales of immortality, which is absolutely a product of the cultural obsession with all manner of vampiric critters, glittering or otherwise. But when an author takes on the astonishingly difficult task of trying to tell a story through the eyes of a character who is essentially immortal starting from the moment of discovery and ending many hundreds of years later, it's hard to ignore.

Harbinger follows Ellis Herrick, a teenager who has lost his show more mother and brother and who has a crush on his neighbor Nichole. But when a serious car crash dismembers him and puts him in the hospital, he discovers that he has an astonishing power: the ability to regrow any part of his body. Ellis, however, isn't the one most interested in this turn of events. Langley Ulin sees Ellis as the fountain of youth and wants to use the young man to keep himself alive forever. What follows is a decades long tale of Ellis' life on Earth, in space, and across the stars, a life filled with love, vengeance, pain, and wonder.

As a love story, Harbinger functions in a most unusual manner. The relationship between Nichole and Ellis is rocky and complicated, not just because of Ellis' rather immature and confused actions, but also because of the fact that he doesn't age. The way Ellis deals with this problem differs from other novels of this kind: he moves around throughout life, never fixed to a position. The somewhat cosmopolitan (or rhizomatic, if you want to get theoretical) nature of Ellis' character is something to take note of as you read, because the conclusion of the novel directly comments upon this issue.

Interesting too is how Ellis goes through life. Due to his condition, he is sought after by all manner of curious people, from those who want to use him as a medical experiment to those who are interested in telling his story, and so on. But Ellis, as previously mentioned, never stays fixed to any of these positions, sometimes on purpose, and other times due to various catalysts in his life (death is a prominent one). It might be difficult to understand at first, because he makes a lot of decisions that would seem stupid, but when put in the perspective of one being immortal and intentionally and unintentionally stuck in a position of independence by his "freak" nature, his life starts to make sense. There is a veritable gold mine of interesting analyses to be made about Ellis and the world that Skillingstead has set out to design here (perhaps someone will take on that task one day).

Ellis is not hopeless, however. His character progresses in unusual ways, but he also acts as a particularly effective mirror for looking at ourselves. You could argue that Ellis lives many lives, and that each one is a reflection of our mortality. Like Ellis, we only get a handful of shots to pursue our greatest passions, and while Ellis certainly has more opportunities than most of us, he still suffers from his failures, because nothing is forever. Perhaps, in a way, by looking at Ellis, we can begin to understand why we are mortal in the first place, because to live through all that Ellis does would seem like a nightmare. Maybe I'm reaching, but it is something worth thinking about.

Skillingstead has absolutely hit the nail on the head with Harbinger. While not a perfect novel, the very fact that Skillingstead has taken on such a daunting narrative task and succeeded in creating an engaging novel is worth noting. Harbinger never drags and each jump forward feels like a natural progression in terms of the narrative itself, which produces a kind of episodic, connected storyline leading to an uncertain conclusion. Perhaps Harbinger's greatest fault is that uncertainty; the conclusion leaves quite a lot of questions and does boggle the mind, which I found particularly problematic considering the clarity of everything preceding it--we understand everything from the motivations of the characters, the world built around them, and so on up until the end. I suspect that some aspect of this uncertainty was intentional, maybe as a way of trying to express the natural confusion one has when exposed to the cultures of people outside of one's generation (think of your great-grandparents trying to grasp the rapid-pace world of the Internet). Still, there's much to love about Harbinger, and I would recommend it for readers and fans of lighter flavors of science fiction. show less

I only meant to read a few pages and I sat down and I read the whole thing. That's how completely engaged I was, right from the start. I'm not entirely sure I got the whole thing, but I sure enjoyed the ride and I'm pretty sure a lot of the ideas and the people and the imagery are going to stick with me for a long while.

Groundhog’s Day meets Alien Under the Dome.
Reviewed @ My Shelf Confessions

Life on the Preservation wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. Now that is both true and not true in a sense. It was exactly what the book description said: One guy stuck in a domed city, while the outside world is mostly nothing but a post apocalyptic wasteland. That is what it was but that is not what the story was at it’s core. I think this was about self preservation and finding the reasons to keep show more going every day.

Fair warning, this isn't really a spoiler because you learn about it pretty much in the very beginning of the book but there are a few sex scenes in Life on the Preservation, and statutory rape. Words are not minced when it comes to descriptions of sexual abuse. It’s by no means over the top but it isn’t glossed over either, so if you don’t want to read about this type of content then this may not be for you.

I was so confused early on because I didn’t know what character to really latch onto. The first 50 pages kept jumping back and forth from a handful of characters that I found it extremely difficult to connect. I was so annoyed! Finally about 150 in I figured I knew who the main players were. After that things started to make sense.

I do wish things were clearer early on about the two alien races. How he could have accomplished this I’m not sure but I just feel it could have been better done.

Things I liked:

- If you have ever watched Groundhog’s Day with Bill Murray – then that is what you can expect. Except there is none if the humor.

- The concept! I really like the whole trapped in a dome thing, We’ve seen it done before but this puts an entirely different twist on it. The word ‘Preservation’ in the title should give you a clue as to what the domed city is as compared to the rest of the outside world that is dying.

- The stark reality of various scenes and situations. Skillingstead doesn’t pull his punches. It was both refreshing and uncomfortable.

- This could be both something I did and did not like, it was just something that was: Ian and Kylie both have some fucked up pasts. While I sympathized with Ian, often I wanted to bitch slap Kylie for her dumbshit-itis moments. Though I have to admit there were a few times that I found her entertaining.

“She thought: I love him. Like telling herself something and hoping she believed it.”

I get that it was probably the point for me to find her tiresome. But I’d it’s one thing I can’t stand it’s being constantly annoyed by a character. There was an extreme amount of character development and growth over the course of Life on the Preservation. I wouldn’t be lying though if I told you Kylie still continued to annoy me even all the way up to the last page.

I was unexpectedly surprised by how satisfied I was with the ending. Much of the reading experience was depressing but then all of a sudden at the end it was as if I was given a nice piece of cake to eat.

*Copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All opinions are completely my own.* show less