Sunday 26 January 2020

Tomorrow's Ancestors: The Base of Reflections by AE Warren


Tomorrow's Ancestors: The Base of Reflections by AE Warren
Published in the UK by Locutions Press on the 6th July 2019.

The first of my 2020 More Than One Challenge reads.


What happens when the future abandons the past?

Elise and her companions have made it to the safety of Uracil but at a price. Desperate to secure her family’s passage, she makes a deal with Uracil's Tri-Council. She’ll become their spy, jeopardising her own freedom in the process, in exchange for her family’s safe transfer. But first she has to help rescue the next Neanderthal, Twenty-Two. 

Twenty-Two has never left the confines of the steel walls that keep her separated from the other exhibits. She has no contact with the outside world and no way of knowing why she has been abandoned. With diminishing deliveries of food and water, she has to start breaking the museum’s rules if she wants a second chance at living.

One belongs to the future and the other to the past, but both have to adapt—or neither will survive…


This second novel in AE Warren's Tomorrow's Ancestors series, The Base Of Reflections, carries on from the first book, The Museum of Second Chances, and I would suggest that the series does need to be read in its intended order. Warren does drop welcome brief reminders about the first book's events, but I don't think this would be enough for a new reader to really appreciate the detail of her imagined future world. In this story we are given a vision of life for the people at Uracil, a community beyond the structured society existing elsewhere. We also get to see inside a second of the official bases when we meet a fourth Neanderthal, Twenty-Two. I loved how Warren has created Twenty-Two's character very differently from Kit's. It would have been easier to envisage a single Neanderthal mindset, but instead Warren takes into account their disparate early lives. Twenty-Two is so much more guarded and almost expects to be let down and abandoned again.

The little details of Uracil's physical appearance really appealed to me, especially the ingenious ideas to keep this settlement obscured from prying eyes. The contrast between the people's flamboyant dress styles and their paranoia about remaining hidden makes for an interesting dynamic. I'm glad I don't have to traverse those tree house walkways though. Just imagining the ropes swaying brought on my vertigo!

The Base Of Reflections is a great title, in both senses of 'to reflect' because I felt the story contains many of uncomfortable truths about our own ways of living in the present day. Warren doesn't thump an environmental drum however, but seeing her characters dealing with this convincingly plausible aftermath is certainly thought-provoking. That said though, the novel itself is a fast-paced and exciting page-turner which, again, kept me gripped from start to finish. I understand AE Warren is writing a third Tomorrow's Ancestors novel at the moment and it can't be finished soon enough for me!

Meet the author   

AE Warren lives in the UK. A not-so-covert nerd with mildly obsessive tendencies, she has happily wiled away an inordinate amount of time reading and watching sci-fi/ fantasy and gaming. She is interested in the ‘what ifs’.

The Museum of Second Chances is her first novel and she is currently writing the third book in the 'Tomorrow's Ancestors' series.

Author links: 
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6 comments:

  1. What an interesting idea for a book.

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    1. I was delighted with this series and loved both the idea and the characters.

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  2. It's good to see that you're still enjoying the series. It's always great when a sequel really delivers!

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    1. Absolutely! I was so pleased that Warren kept up her excellent standard through this second book

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  3. It sounds like this one is a fantastic book and that the author knows how to pay incredibly attention to description which only adds to the world and characters they show us here. So I think I might have to look into these ones...

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