Blog tour: The Transcendent Tide by Doug Johnstone
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘It’s been eighteen months since the Enceladons escaped the clutches of an American military determined to exterminate the peaceful alien creatures.
‘Lennox and Vonnie have been lying low in the Scottish Highlands, Ava has been caring for her young daughter Chloe, and Heather is adjusting to her new life with Sandy and the other Enceladons in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Greenland. But fate is about to bring them together again for one last battle.
‘When Lennox and Vonnie are visited by Karl Jensen, a Norwegian billionaire intent on making contact with the Encedalons again, they are wary of subjecting the aliens to further dangers. But when word arrives that Ava’s daughter has suffered an attack and might die without urgent help, they reluctantly make the trip to Greenland, where they enlist the vital help of local woman Niviaq.
‘It’s not long before they’re drawn into a complex web of lies, deceit and death. What is Karl’s company really up to? Why are sea creatures attacking boats? Why is Sandy acting so strangely, and why are polar bears getting involved?’
In The Transcendent Tide, the final part of Doug Johnstone’s Enceladons trilogy, we reunite with Lennox, Vonnie, Ava, Chloe, Heather, and octopoid Sandy in the Arctic, a year and a half after the events of The Collapsing Wave.
When Ava finds out toddler Chloe has a brain tumour, she knows her best bet is to seek out Sandy and the other Enceladons – they cured Heather’s cancer, after all. Fortuitously, techbro billionaire Karl Jensen has recently approached Lennox and Vonnie asking for their help connecting him to the Enceladons, and while they don’t entirely trust his intentions, the group agree to his plan to fly them out to his scientific complex in Greenland for Chloe’s sake.
Heather, meanwhile, has been living with the Enceladons, and has become largely Enceladon herself. However, she hasn’t fully assimilated with the whole, and with the kernel of human individuality she retains, she’s perturbed to notice the aliens have been adopting an increasingly anti-human stance in the wake of new, destructive activities in their previously undisturbed ecosystem.
With its fast pace, twists and turns, dangerous situations, and engaging developments, The Transcendent Tide reaches the high bar set by its predecessors. I always learn something new and interesting from Doug Johnstone’s books, and this time it was a pleasure to dip into Inuit culture and history, through the gang’s endearing new friend Niviaq.
Unlike in the previous instalments, however, Sandy seems to have gone dark, associating the majority of humans with “bad energy”, and being markedly less eager to befriend and help them.
Having settled in an underwater ecosystem, the Enceladons now feel better-aligned with the animals they live in harmony with than the people who exploit nature – and have even taken matters into their own tentacles, organising the sealife around them to attack boats and machinery. This causes consternation among their human friends, as well as Heather, who, despite looking much like an Enceladon now, still remembers what it was like to be fully human, and continues to relate to humankind.
After all, it’s one thing to cheer when an orca rams a billionaire’s superyacht, and another when employees who need to feed their families in a capitalist system are killed by animals on the order of aliens who absolutely know what they’re doing. Our heroes are dismayed by the Enceladons’ new taste for violence, and I was sad to see the change in them, too.
These developments raised a number of questions for me. Have the Enceladons’ negative encounters with humans spoiled their previously peaceful nature? Was the capacity for violence always within them, but drawn out by the particular conditions on Earth? Can we really blame them for becoming jaded, when certain types of human have sought to exploit and/or destroy them again and again?
On a separate note, various characters speculate on the possibility of spreading the Enceladons’ power of telepathy to everyone – whether as a gift, or a biological enhancement you have to pay for – but this also brings up questions. Would everyone be just as wowed and humbled by it as the goodies in this story are? Or would the more acquisitive, competitive, and exploitative people our heroes keep running into just find ways to use it for bad?
And considering Heather’s cancer returned after Sandy cured it the first time, and Chloe, who connected with Sandy before she was even born, now has a brain tumour, would there be too much of a trade-off involved?
The Transcendent Tide is a bittersweet conclusion to an action-packed, thought-provoking trilogy.
