UTOPIA PROJECT

A small group in New England survives a cataclysmic event tied to a destructive cult and battles for survival in Dering’s SF series thriller.

In the near future, U.S. Army Gen. Eric Hyland is aboard a Utopia Project ship in the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic, where he’s being forced by an extreme group called “elders” to work on a project that could destroy all of humanity. A program to condition children for a utopian future society has gone very wrong, so the elders now plan to exterminate humanity with neutron beam attacks. Only those aboard the Utopia ships will survive, as will some designated wildlife areas, so Eric is trying to surreptitiously find ways to save his friends and family by carving out other areas to escape the onslaught. The Elders grow suspicious, but Eric manages to pull it off, and his parents, daughter, and some others survive, relatively unscathed. His mother, however, needs a lifesaving drug, and his daughter Sara’s boyfriend is tasked with gathering a supply and driving it to Vermont. Through all the confusion and the destruction, Eric wants nothing more than to escape the ship and join his family, but when the elders take Sara captive, he must rescue her, get off the ship, and get ready for an inevitable showdown. Dering’s dystopian novel, the second in a trilogy, tackles a monumental disaster in a convincing manner by emphasizing the protagonist’s technical know-how, his close relations, and locations that readers will find familiar. The evil scheme is described in chilling detail and the work includes crucial references to the previous installment of the series. The action scenes, battles, and betrayals work well as a cat-and-mouse game, but on the whole, the book feels overly lengthy. The events of the ninth and 11th days after the cataclysm, in particular, go on for an awfully long time, undercutting the narrative tension.

A dystopian novel of epic proportions that’s imaginative but unnecessarily protracted.