Theories of Flight

When we last saw our hero in Equations of Life he was awaiting a new heart in a London Freezone hostpital, having survived encounters with the Yakuza, the Russian Mafia, the New Machine Jihad, possibly saving the world and solving the solution The Theory of Everything at the same time. Sammuil Petrovitch is both a survivor and a genius. Theories of Flight pits him against old and new enemies, forces him to form new alliances, and once again possibly save the planet. But in the first chapter we learn that he has in fact created atificial gravity, thereby changing the course of human history should human history still have a course, and he has married Maddy, the six-foot-tall now ex-nun he fell in love with in Volume One.

Morden doesn't let the action flag for a page in this second novel. Petrovitch can enjoy his immediate international fame for only a few minutes before he is off to the side of his injured wife, now with the London Metrozone police. Soon he learns his own life is danger. CIA agents are snooping around to discover just what happened during the event now referred to as The Long Night. No one, but Petrovitch, fully understands just what the New Machine Jihad was, but the CIA can smell a potential new weapon and they want it bad. People start to die, no one can be trusted, and the London Freezone, for years one of the few livable if miserable places in Great Britain, is under attack by the Outies, those who were exposed to too much radiation during the New Armageddon and have been forcibly kept out of the city for two decades.

Petrovitch seems to be running for most of the book -- it's a good thing he got that new artificial heart -- and I couldn't help but think of Jason Bourne while I was reading. I've never read a Bourne book but I've seen the movies and marveled at their narrative drive. Bourne knows how to keep himself alive and has an amazing skill set to help him with that task. Petrovitch is similar, but what Morden's books really celebrate is that fact his hero is a genius, and its because of that he can successfully lead the defense of London with the the help of a sentient artificial intelligence named Michael, a ninja bodyguard, a woman from the Russian mafia, and fourteen-year-old London schoolgirl who proves to be fearless in combat. Remember, if the book's first chapter he has solved one of the great remaining questions of modern physics. With his new team, saving London is a fantastically blood battle, but he is fierce in pursuit of his goal.