02/17/2025
Orton’s turbulent time-travel thriller, the first of her Madders of Time series, takes place in the not-so-distant future, where calamity has struck the Earth: climate change ravages the planet, and the microdrones designed to correct it have instead wiped out all living things. Trapped in a failing biodome, the final survivors, roboticist Isabel Sanborn and her boyfriend Diego Nadales, along with their AI companion Matt “Madders” Hudson, make a last-ditch effort to save humanity. They send Diego back in time with a warning to their younger selves: stop Dave Kirkland, the billionaire responsible for the disaster.
Fans of second chance romance will delight in Diego’s efforts to woo a past version of Isabel, while sci-fi junkies will no doubt revel in the story’s technological aspects, from Isabel’s lethal microdrones to Dave’s self-sufficient biodomes designed to house the remnants of humanity. After an effectively bleak opener, Orton keeps things relatively light and humorous in the novel’s past, while finding space to inject tangible stakes and gripping tragedy along the way; this tonal weaving isn’t always seamless, but consistent characters and succinct prose keeps the whole from unraveling.
In spite of the grand “save the world” narrative fringing the plot, Orton hews closest to the interpersonal relationships beating at its heart, affecting moments of cozy fiction in places like Diego’s picturesque cabin in the mountains, where he and Isabel rekindle their love alongside a sweet golden retriever named Tolstoy and Lucky, Isabel’s sassy cat. Elsewhere, Orton takes giddy stabs at government ineptitude via NSA Agent Johnson, who badgers the living Matt and his scientist cohorts with a frivolousness that often strains credibility. Still, Hive is an eminently engrossing read, full of heart, humor, and horror alike, with a surprisingly dark turn in its 11th hour that will have readers chomping at the bit for what’s next.
Takeaway: Engrossing doomsday thriller spliced with heart, humor, and second chances.
Comparable Titles: Randy Anderson’s Time Phantom, KJ Nelson’s Relive.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A-
2025-01-31
In Orton’s SF series-starter, a strange sphere that crashes in Colorado turns out to be part of a desperate time-travel strategy.
Only two human survivors, and a British-accented artificial intelligence called Madders, subsist in a Denver-based Eden-17 Biodome survival complex, one of many such fortresses erected by flashy tycoon-inventor David Kirkland (who bears an unflattering resemblance to Elon Musk). Such shelters had been conceived for Mars colonization but were repurposed to save humanity after a series of terrestrial catastrophes—some climate-related, others attributable to Kirkland's own greed and hubris, such as a lethal, rogue swarm of autonomous predator-microdrone bees. In an ultimate gambit to stop the end of the world, Isabel, her ardently devoted erstwhile lover Diego, and Madders use another Kirkland invention—involving time travel and trans-temporal communication—to try to disrupt critical events 35 years ago that put Earth on a doomsday course. Wisely, the author doesn’t spell out exactly how the time-travel caper is supposed to work; however, when a mystery sphere, undetected by NORAD, crashes in the Denver of the past, it triggers anomalies and anachronisms that will rewrite the timeline and redefine the earlier lives of Isabel, Diego and British physicist Matthew Hudson—who, in the future, will serve as the template for Madders (“Crikey Moses. I’m like a dog with two tails”). But will all this move humanity away from the upcoming apocalypse without creating other paradoxes? Numerous SF/pop-culture references are effectively seeded throughout the tale (especially from the 1985 filmBack to the Future), and, occasionally, the characters’ banter appealingly has the feel of a rom-com. However, beneath the story’s smart-alecky exterior is a very smart interior, developing character relationships well and guiding hoary SF time-travel conceits in fresh, imaginative, and strangely relatable directions, considering they involve quantum physics and parallel universes. It takes until the third act for the action to really take off, but when it does, readers will likely be hooked by the unresolved cliffhanger finale, leading to the next volume.
A lively start to a time-hopping thriller series that deserves some buzz.
