INTERGALACTICA

A psychotherapist gathers a team to foil her brilliant father’s Earth-threatening schemes in Trotta’s SF novel.

In Chicago in the year 2041, Amanda is a neuropsychiatrist who keeps her career and location hidden due to her fear of her estranged father, Oswald, a power-mad inventor and technocrat with a supervillain lair in far-off Reykjavik, Iceland. Amanda has just recovered from a visionary near-death experience, giving her the spiritual motivation to assemble and train a gifted team of former patients to oppose her father. Oswald’s influential but below-the-radar company, The Firm, staffed by whole armies of brainwashed minions, has its hooks in a historic, high-profile NASA voyage to Jupiter’s moon Europa, seeking life under its frozen oceans. Amanda realizes this is a facade for Oswald’s true objectives—the harvesting of vast amounts of energy and the deployment of revolutionary space-travel propulsion. Neither bodes well for Earth, where Oswald’s hidden influence orchestrates war, assassination, religious hatred, and other mayhem. Amanda and her comrades infiltrate The Firm, and when their mission goes off the rails, they must undertake the incredible space voyage themselves. What starts as a semi-grounded tale of paranoia turns into a way-out fantastic journey, featuring surreal encounters with bizarre aliens and environments: “Amanda saw the population of what was likely an entire Pleiadian city floating above sea-level while sitting down with arms outstretched, all with closed eyes and sharing the same frequency of peace.” The sadistic Oswald functions as a hissable villain as a plethora of perils proliferate in vintage-pulps fashion (romance is utterly absent). A climactic narrative twist compels the reader to rethink all that has gone before and to recontextualize much of the more over-the-top material. The open ending portends sequels. Scattered black-and-white comic-book-style illustrations (mostly character portraits) by de Almeida and Polonia punctuate the episodic narrative.

A far-out, Flash-Gordon-on-hallucinogens SF adventure, reined in (slightly) by a whiplash twist ending.