There never seem to be good options.Īnd when you’re not swept away by a story, you can start to question it. Only Human has its share of excitement and adventure, but it often sits between a rock and a hard place. The previous two installments though were a mystery filled with excitement – even if sometimes that excitement was scary. That’s not to say that this particular story is without hope. And then it throws on top the angst of a teenager desperately seeking out belonging while in seemingly constant conflict with her parent. It takes on otherness, isolation, and non-interference. We often read stories in sci-fi and superhero worlds hoping to see characters that represent the best of us, but this story stares down a darker place built out of fear and helplessness. And for this book between our real-world news cycle, the separation it seems so many seek to enforce in society, and how all that makes me feel personally – this story was a little too real, a little too disheartening. Often personal reactions and experiences are informed by various elements coming together to inform it instead of any one particular thing.

Of course there are parallels between the two places and for me it sometimes got to be too much.

The story itself flashes back and forth between the years on the other planet and what happens after the trio returns to Earth. Once again the novel’s text is only dialogue and internal monologues in the form of journal entries, letters, and transcripts of interviews and other recorded conversations.

Nearly ten years after Waking Gods stranded them on an alien planet, physicist Rose Franklin, linguist Vincent Couture, and his daughter Eva return to Earth to find humans locked in what seems like a battle to decimate themselves. cover img: Del Rey / Penguin Random House Now the Themis Files trilogy concludes with author Sylvain Neuvel’s Only Human and I have mixed feelings. Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods are two of my favorite sci-fi books from recent years.

The themis files series