This second novel from Matthew D. Saeman shows some promise and some good writing, but it unfortunately doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s marketed as both “hard science fiction” and “political thrillers & suspense.” It wants to be both, but turns out not to execute either as well as the author could have. In the end, despite a plot with plenty of action and elements of suspense that drew me in, I was not satisfied with the characters, the story, or the ending. And yet, I did not hate this book and I’m not ruling out reading more of Mr. Saeman’s work as he develops as an author.

Start with the political thriller, which is the better-executed of the two genres/stories. William Doud is the President of the United States in a near-future time when Mars missions are happening and terraforming the planet for future colonization is in progress, but otherwise things (including technology) are unchanged from 2024. The Middle East is still in turmoil when a new leader, al-Hussein, rises up to unite ISIS, the Taliban, and Al Quida into a kind of super-villain Muslim army that takes over the entire Middle East, torturing and killing non-believers, and generally posing an existential threat to the rest of the world. Despite President Doud’s warnings to the UN and NATO, the world’s leaders do nothing, allowing al-Hussein to run rampant like Hitler prior to World War II. Doud orders a SEAL team to fly into Iraq to assassinate al-Hussein, but the mission is a failure when he CIA’s mole inside al-Hussein’s operation turns on the US and alerts the enemy to the plan. Everyone is killed, including one SEAL who is beheaded on video. One member of the team, Jack, is set free so he can tell the tale and bring the video back to Doud and verify its authenticity. OK, interesting start. What will Doud do in response? Will the world survive the imminent war? What will Jack’s role be? Political thriller, indeed.

The President has access to a super-bomb that can vaporize everything within a hundred miles or more. He plans to drop the super-bomb on the region – wiping out al-Hussein and the entire Middle East, eliminating the terrorist threat. He makes this plan in secret, hoping to execute it without anyone else knowing other than his CIA director, his Vice-President, and Jack, who will lead the bombing mission along with a crew of four dishonorably discharged SEALs who are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to destroy the evil empire. Will Doud’s plan succeed? Will others find out about it? This plot is center-cut political thriller. The idea of genocide and the murder of millions as a pre-emptive strike against al-Hussein’s fledgling empire is a radical move, and one sure to draw negative attention if known in advance or afterwards, is a bit far-fetched, but certainly fine for thriller fiction.

Now, here comes the science fiction element. The super-bomb is a rock discovered on Mars by a mission two years earlier. The mission was to begin terraforming Mars, but a geologist found an unusual rock, very light, as if hollow, and hard as diamond on the exterior. When he put the football-sized stone in an oven to see how it reacted to heat, it exploded (when the temperature reached 71-degrees Fahrenheit), leveling the entire expedition and a massive Martian crater. The scientists at NASA could not be sure if the explosion was just the single stone, or if the ignition of the one triggered the detonation of more of them in the vicinity that created a chain-reaction. But it was massive and deadly.

Upon hearing about this exploding stone on Mars, Doud orders NASA to send up another mission to collect more of them and bring them back to Earth. Although it is obvious to the reader that Doud’s plan is obviously to use the super-bombs as a weapon, nobody on Earth objects and the claimed purpose of the mission is to clear out Mars of these hazards so that the terraforming operation can continue. The new mission team consists of a four-person flight command crew (whom we never really meet), one geologist named Terrance, and five Navy SEALs, lead by Jack, armed to the teeth with assault rifles and ammo. Why send the armed SEALs into space? Why send only one geologist, charged with finding every exploding stone on the planetary surface? And why risk bringing these super-bombs back to Earth? None of these questions are asked by the press, politicians, foreign leaders, or anyone else.

The new Mars mission will last at least 18 months. In the meantime, Doud bides his time. War does not break out with al-Hussein’s califate, and everyone on Earth seems oblivious to the fact that the NASA team is now headed back to Earth with a payload of the most dangerous weapon in human knowledge. (Everyone seems happy to assume the stones are entirely stable as long as they don’t get exposed to a temperature of 71 degrees. This is hardly a proven fact, but everyone accepts it as gospel.) The mission ship is outfitted with a refrigerated storage bay where the death-stones will be stored and transported at a temperature below 71 degrees. Only Terrance has the key-code for the storage bay, which has a single refrigeration unit, which nobody on the ship knows how to fix if it breaks down.

The Sci-Fi portion of the book is the weakest. The author repeatedly forgets about the physics of a zero-gravity environment and describes action as if it were happening aboard the starship Enterprise with an artificial gravity in place. The ship itself is never described, except that it has re-entry ability like a Space Shuttle, has a mess hall where the crew all eats at the same time like a high school cafeteria, and there is a ladder connecting the lower level to the flight deck. When the ship reaches Earth, it is somehow able to fly like an airplane, change course (under the direction of the NASA command center, which can control everything remotely and lock out the crew from having manual control of the flight path) so that Doud, with the assistance of the NASA director, can re-route the incoming bomb-carrying shuttle toward the Middle East. It also travels at commercial airplane speed, rather than the 17,000 mph speed of a normal re-entry vehicle. (The author could have provided a sci-fi explanation for how, in the future, NASA developed a space ship that could blast off for Mars and then re-enter the atmosphere at slow speed, allowing it to then fly like an airplane once below the stratosphere, but he chose not to provide any explanation about the characteristics of the shuttle-like vehicle.)

Along the way, Terrance figures out what’s going on and tries to thwart the evil plan. When Jack decides to flip sides and help Terrance, they do not dump the payload of stone-bombs into space (which was the obvious action), but rather decide to continue on to Earth, try to land the shuttle, then expose the Doud conspiracy (somehow), and hope for the best. Pretty poor plan.

The science fiction elements are poorly executed. The science doesn’t make sense, the actions of the characters on the ship don’t make sense, the configuration of the mission crew in the first place makes no sense, and the descriptions of Mars and the process of having Terrance single-handedly try to find the buried stones like a prospector on the beach with a metal detector, don’t make sense. The characters on board the space shuttle somehow have the ability to send emails to colleagues on Earth and have secret video phone calls to Earth without NASA mission control knowing about them. Metal objects stay seated on tables until needed for a fight scene, when they can be picked up and used as weapons in a zero-G environment. Characters float around, but also can drink from standard liquor bottles, swish liquid around in their drinking glasses, and leap toward each other and plant punches that knock out their opponent.

There is some manufactured suspense when the air conditioner unit in the cargo bay stops working for no reason that is ever explained (and apparently doesn’t have any backup system to keep the dangerous stones from exploding) and when one of the villain SEALs tries to kill Terrance because he’s a psychopath who never should have been cleared by NASA to be on the mission in the first place. But these devices feel like filler rather than true suspense.

So, we have the cartoonish political thriller plot and the poorly-executed sci-fi mission-to-Mars plot, all of which converge in the exciting climax when we learn whether Doud’s plan to destroy the entire Middle East will succeed or not. I was not impressed with the ending.

The characters in the story are mostly cartoons. The evil President Doud, intent on carrying out his plan to annihilate al-Hussein’s entire cartel of countries and every civilian with them, is emotionless and fixated on his goal. All the people around him are toadies. His Chief of Staff is a character, devoted to his boss since High School, yet he for no apparent reason digs into the conspiracy and threatens to expose his boss. The NASA director is a woman with no morals who blindly follows the President’s orders. Whenever they need cooperation from an underling, they threaten to hurt or kill the person’s loved ones like Mafia Cappos. None of them are sympathetic or even conflicted. Terrance is the “good guy” who tries to do the right thing, but he is surrounded by villains. Jack has a miraculous and unexplained epiphany and decides to flip on Doud, but rather than being true character growth, it is a jarring switch that seems to be a necessary plot twist rather than something Jack would really do.

In the end, the story is at once compelling and also frustrating as the author’s execution of the story elements makes for an unsatisfying conclusion.

The writing is often good, but at other times the dialogue is stilted and the descriptions don’t make sense. There are huge leaps forward in time (necessary since the mission lasts 18 months) without any explanation of what has happened in the interim. There are also a few too many copy editing errors. But there is also some promise here for an author who certainly can create interesting situations and keep the reader turning pages. There are plenty of examples of clever language, apt similes, and decent dialogue. This author has the ability to spin out an interesting story and write well enough to keep his readers interested. A little more work on the plot, a few more beta readers who can help with the plot holes, a little more care concerning the details, and perhaps a better focus on just one genre at a time, could make Mr. Saeman’s next book much better. Keep an eye on this author, and feel free to read Serve, Protect, and Destroy if you enjoy an action-packed political thriller and don’t mind overlooking the details for the sake of the thrill ride.