Portals in a Northern Sky

Charles Douglas Hayes

Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)

Transport Yourself Through Time and Thought.

This deftly woven story crosses genres from thriller to adventure, science fiction to historical, discussing philosophy and literature all the way. Portals in a Northern Sky is a book you will want to savour.

You'll meet:

The secret team behind Portals System: a new technology that shows the past in real time and that the U.S. president is about to unleash on the world

Bob Thornton: One of Wall Street's hottest whiz kids, who throws away the materialist life and hitchhikes to the Alaska wilderness in the company of Ruben Sanchez, an impassioned skeptic and self-taught philosopher.

Sara Spencer Peek: Crossing the prairies as a teenager in the 1860s, she rises out of unimaginable grief and loss to build a new life for herself - not just once, but several times - and remains a fixture in the lives of her descendants.

Vince Terrell: The tortured inner-city cop who avenges his sister's death - and risks his own - by stealing both the money and the dope in a back-alley drug deal.

Adam Whitehead: The scientist who made Portals possible and who mysteriously disappears just as James Tall Tree, a native Sioux and the president’s national science advisor, desperately needs to find him.

If you're a fan of Herman Melville's Moby Dick... Jack London's Call of the Wild... Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged... the imaginary worlds of Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, or Isaac Asimov... the gripping thrillers of Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, or John Grisham... or any book that raises core questions about the purpose of life, education, or fate, Portals in a Northern Sky is a must-read.

Review by Paul Lappen (300803) Rating (9/10)

Review by Paul Lappen
Rating 9/10
This multi-faceted novel takes place in and around the state of Alaska. Part of it is a multi-generation saga of one family over the last 150 years. It starts with a young woman named Sara Spencer Peek, part of a westward-bound wagon train in the mid 19th century.

Back in the present, Bob Thornton is a Wall Street superstar, who, one day, walks away from everything, and heads for Alaska. He's not totally sure where he's going or what he'll do once he gets there, but there has to be more to life than Wall Street. While hitchhiking, he is picked up by Ruben Sanchez, self-educated philosopher. They do a lot of talking about philosophy, most of it centred on the book Moby Dick.

Adam Whitehead is a world-renowned physicist doing his best to drop off the face of the earth. Both his parents died of complications from Alzheimer's Disease, and, being of the age where such a thing is a major concern, he is terrified that he will be next.

Should it happen, he will end his own life before he ends up in some nursing home. James Tall Tree, the Presidential Science Adviser, calls out the Alaska State Police in almost-desperate search for Whitehead. His theories have led to a mjor discovery that is about to be released to the public. Tall Tree wants to officially acknowledge Whitehead's contribution.

It has become possible to go back in time and watch events as they happen in real time. Going to any coordinates, as long as it was outside and there was no cloud cover, it is possible to go back as far as the cavemen and watch it 'live'. Access to this system will be freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. The repercussions for all of human society, especially fields like history and archaeology, will, of course, be cataclysmic.

I really enjoyed this book, but it's not for everyone. The reader had better like homegrown, self-educated philosophy, because there is a lot of it in this book. Otherwise, it works as a science fiction novel, as a Jack London-type adventure novel, and it will give the reader plenty to think about. It's very much worth reading.
Paul Lappen (30th August 2003)