The Testing Ground - The Cave

by Louis Evan Grivetti, Sargent Thurber Reynolds

Overview

Searching for an inhabitable planet, crew members of the KosMa ExPlorer discover an uncharted orb similar to their distant home. During regional exploration, they discover a cave containing materials documenting the history and demise of intelligent bipeds that apparently have vanished. These reports cryptically describe the planet's sequential life forms, from simple to complex civilizations. All these life forms were created by the Great Spirit Etowah, a cosmic force that assigns an Observer and Overseer team to impassively record, evaluate, and recommend continuation or extermination cycles. One document contains an explicit warning from Etowah to the orb bipeds: abide by my seven commandments, otherwise suffer extermination. An expansive memorandum chronicles a sequence of events when a computer-hacker terrorist implements a plan that succeeds far beyond his expectations to bring down the American banking and economic system. Subsequent events spiral wildly out of control, initiating hunger, thirst, and anarchy among survivors. Unimaginable chaos follows with the near-demise of global intelligent life forms. Unique individual and communal survival strategies develop at various isolated settlement groups. During the difficult recovery phase, some bipeds continue to ignore Etowah's commandments. Will the actions of these few trigger a final catastrophic mass extinction of the bipeds? Is the unnamed orb merely a convenient cosmic setting for Etowah's amusement, a "testing ground" on which life forms are created, managed, and eliminated, and where cyclical patterns reflect cosmic indifference? What is the future of the orb's bipeds: survival or extermination?

Product Details

BN ID:	2940150825796
Publisher:	EditPros LLC
Publication date:	07/24/2015
Series:	The Testing Ground , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Louis Evan Grivetti is a professor emeritus in the Department of Nutrition, University of California, Davis (UC Davis). He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in paleontology at UC Berkeley (thesis: Intertidal Foraminifera of the Farallon Islands) and his Ph.D. in geography at UC Davis (dissertation: Dietary Resources and Social Aspects of Food Use in a Tswana Tribe). His academic research specializations have included cultural and historical geography, domestication of plants and animals; food history; and wild plant use during drought and civil unrest/war – with implications for health and nutritional status.
Sargent Thurber Reynolds is a retired technician for Valley Toxicology, and exploration geologist and consultant with Reynolds, Bain and Reynolds, and Tri-Valley Oil & Gas Co. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology at UC Berkeley (thesis: Geology of the North Half Bannack Quadrangle, Beaverhead County, Montana), with a secondary credential at National University. He is an ardent angler, past president of the Fly Fishers of Davis, Calif., and past president of the Northern California Council Federation of Fly Fishers.
Both authors have lived and worked extensively within the western, central, eastern, and southern regions of North America, and have lived, traveled, or worked in the Middle East. The Testing Ground volumes represent their initial literary collaboration.