Departure

Before I even started reading this I had decided it would be rubbish and I bought it for 99p just as a bit of light entertainment. As you can see though, it ended up with three stars, indicating it wasn't total rubbish after all, the saving grace being it turned out to be a story about time travel. And who doesn't like a bit of time travel?
So, Departure begins on a flight from the USA to London Heathrow, with a bit of argy-bargy going on in the first class cabin. The plane crashes and miraculously about half the passengers survive. Although the plane has come down in the middle of England, no help arrives and the passengers have to coordinate their own rescue of trapped people and administer their own medical aid. After a number of days show more without any rescue, passengers start to die apparently due to accelerated ageing and the main characters head off in search of help. It soon becomes clear that something is badly wrong and that somehow the flight has crashed 150 years in the future and that things have gone badly for humanity.
It was a 99p book so this was not a masterpiece by any means. The characters were not well fleshed out, were a bit cliched (a brusque German doctor behaving just as you would expect a brusque German doctor to behave) and were not people that you could develop any empathy for. show less

Not a horrible book, but not a very good one, either. The beginning was not bad, with some interesting mysteries set up. But eventually the plot got bogged down in unnecessary overcomplication.

The author also made some weird decisions. When we first meet Nick Stone, he's a rough-and-tumble, take charge kind of guy that knows how to galvanize the lost. And we're constantly given hints about his profession, but not told until about halfway in. So the reader is left to wonder if this man of action is a soldier, a spy, a sophisticated thief, or something else equally interesting and mysterious.

When I found out what he did do? Yeah, no spoilers here, but I just thought, oh, really? Big deal..

Other than that it got far too meta for me toward show more the end, and the author dragged...and I do mean d r a g g e d...the ending out far too long. Riddle's a fan of over-describing everything.

While there was some interesting stuff in the novel, the best I can say about it is, kudos to Riddle for not dragging this out into a trilogy or something. I was happy when it was finally over. show less

Riddle, A. G. Departure. HarperVoyager, 2015.
A plane headed for Heathrow crashes in the English countryside, but no rescuers show up and everyone’s cell phone is dead. Think Lost, Twilight Zone, and Millennium, to name a few stories that used a similar premise. It is not the premise that matters but the character problems that the plane crash and the isolation generate. We bounce back and forth between alternating first-person narratives featuring Nick and Harper. Yes, we want them to become a couple, and the story doesn’t need its science fiction gimmick to tell us that. 3.5 stars

Another book involving quantum leaps and time travel - if you don't like these types of books, you might want to skip this. Personally, I like them, even though I think much of it is too far-fetched to be possible. This one was lots of fun, and of course, confusing at times. But it including a dystopian future, and even some romance, so what's not to like?

It also includes a lesson that makes a lot of sense; using technology to improve life won't necessarily work because people need to improve. Otherwise we will just use the technology to make bigger and faster mistakes.

I was actually first introduced to Departure as an audio title (given how often I browse for interesting new titles to listen to, it was pretty hard to miss how often it popped up on the popular science fiction and fantasy audiobook lists). What I didn’t know, was that the book itself was originally self-published. The news of its success must have caught on though, because I just learned recently too that HarperCollins has bought it and will be re-releasing it later this year. Runaway hits like that often have a way of catching my attention, so my curiosity probably got the better of me when I decided to check this one out.

The story begins with the crash of a passenger plane on route to London from New York. Flight 305 ends up show more somewhere in the English countryside, its fuselage split in two. In spite of this, there are actually quite a few survivors, most of them from first class because their half of the plane went into the trees while the tail section went into a nearby lake. As the survivors treat the wounded and fight to save as many lives as they can, they soon realize that they have crashed into a very different world. Rescue might be a long time coming. If ever.

There’s not much more I say about the story without spoiling it, but suffice to say, the Lost vibes are strong with this one. If you enjoy mind-bending sci-fi thrillers with a slight touch of creepy mystery, you should give this one a look. On the other hand, if you were looking forward to more of a survival adventure, you’ll probably want to alter your expectations like I did. As someone with a fear of flying, I was really nervous and bracing myself for a heart-pounding intro, but what I ended up getting was barely a notch above suspenseful. After the first quarter of this book, the emphasis also rapidly shifts to the bigger conspiracy.

The focus mainly falls on five passengers: Harper Lane writes biographies for a living, but her real dream is to writer her own series of adventure novels one day; Nick Stone is an American businessman, on his way to a meeting with The Gibraltar Project to discuss the building of a dam in the Mediterranean; Sabrina Schröder is a German medical scientist, making her the best choice to care for the wounded crash victims even though most of her experience was in a lab; Yul Tan, a Chinese-American computer scientist, has just developed a quantum internet capable of transmitting more data farther and faster than anything seen before; Grayson Shaw, son of a billionaire philanthropist, is struggling with alcohol problems after finding out some news about his father.

Unbeknownst to any of them, these five characters are all connected in some way and may hold the clues to the reason why their plane crashed, not to mention an answer to where they’ve ended up. The details are gradually revealed as the events unravel, and it was a captivating journey to discover the truth – even in spite of the many confusing moments along the way. To be honest, this book ventured a little too far into hard sci-fi territory for me to feel truly comfortable, and even though I was able to follow the plot just fine, a lot of the themes that came up later in the book are just not topics I find interesting. Be that as it may, I didn’t actually dislike this book; I found most of the story very enjoyable in fact, and even liked how it ended (as opposed to how I felt about Lost!) but it’s difficult to ignore the technology aspects that I personally couldn’t get into.

As for my thoughts that are specific to the audio version, I’m always happy listening to multi-narrator books and I thought both Nicola Barber and Scott Aiello delivered excellent performances. They portrayed Harper and Nick respectively, and voiced their own characters’ dialogue even when they were in the other character’s perspectives, giving this audiobook a quasi full-cast feel without it actually being a full-cast production. With their natural performances, the two narrators also made a lot of the dialogue sound a lot less awkward than the way it probably looked on paper.

In truth, I don’t think I would have fared as well reading the print version of this, given the propensity for my eyes to glaze over when they come upon pages of technobabble, especially when they have to do with subjects like the quantum theories of time travel. My brain has a better time when this stuff is read to me, so I was quite happy with my decision to listen to Departure in audio format. This is a book I might have enjoyed more if it had been the survival adventure I expected, but all told it’s a pretty solid book with a story that will no doubt appeal more to sci-fi thriller fans who also enjoy some conspiracy with their mystery. show less

Flight 305, traveling from New York to London, suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, leaving its passengers struggling to survive. The survivors begin to wonder exactly where they are when the help they expected doesn’t arrive. And soon it becomes clear that the answers they seek may be more complex . . . and more frightening . . . than anything they could ever have imagined.

Nick Stone and Harper Lane take turns narrating the story and the unfolding saga is one of courage, honor, and treachery. “Dream big, work hard, live forever” is the promise held out to the world, but unforeseen events turn the truth into something far more sinister.

“Departure,” a science fiction mystery, is filled with strong, show more well-developed, characters involved in a fast-paced story that captures the reader from the very first page. The thought-provoking tale is riveting, filled with unexpected twists and turns that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Crisp, compelling writing, imaginative plotting with just the right amount of grounding in science, and unexpected surprises make this a not-to-be-missed book.

Highly recommended. show less

Venture capitalist Nick Stone and writer Harper Lane are passengers on Flight 305 from NYC along with a plane full of other strangers. However. the plane crashes in rural England prior to reaching London. After several days waiting for rescue, the survivors learn that they are approximately 150 years in the future and a world that has been decimated by a pandemic. (I did not realize at the time I picked up this book that this world would be in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic.)

Additionally, Stone and Lane discover that their respective personal actions in the past have caused much of the future problems. Shortly after the time of the crash in the present day, the two as well as other integral passengers will become part of an elite show more cabal to create an Utopian world with unlimited power, transportation, and knowledge available to all. However, as is often the case, their plans go awry. Scientists in the future have removed the plane from the timeline into the future in an attempt to change the past and therefore, the future. However, not everyone is on board regarding what to do with the Flight 305 survivors. One faction believes that the passengers should remain in the future but what would be the consequence on the subsequent time line. Another faction believes that the passengers should be returned to the past realizing the impact of their past actions. However, will they do something else that have a negative future impact. The arguments have become so heated that they it has become a war.

I did enjoy the story, but its themes with modification has been replayed in television shows such as Lost and Manifest as well as a number of science-fiction novels and stories. show less