Sleeping Giants

Synopsis from Goodreads.com:

The Themis Files is a deeply human story about a world-changing alien discovery.

17 years ago, a young girl named Rose fell through the ground in the Black Hills and found herself in an underground chamber filled with gleaming symbols, lying in the palm of a giant metal hand. Now a physicist, Rose leads a research team struggling to determine the hand's origins. When another giant limb is discovered, she quickly devises a method for unearthing the hidden pieces, convinced there is an entire body out there waiting to be found.

Halfway around the globe, Kara watches helplessly as her helicopter shuts down over a pistachio field in Turkey. That'll leave a mark, but she's about to crash her way into what might be the greatest endeavor in human history.

This is a hunt for truth, power, and giant body parts. Written as a series of interview transcripts, journal entries and mission logs, The Themis Files tells the tale of a handful of people whose lives are inexorably linked by the discovery of an alien device and the commotion that follows.

Review/Comment:

I bought this book in 2017, kept it in my bookshelf until I have all three of the Themis Files series. Last two weeks, I don't know what have gotten me, I just took this book out while I was cleaning my room and started reading it.

It is a quick read, I assure you. It doesn't have the lengthy narrative or descriptive I usually find. It is in the form of interviews and journal entries. There would be a mysterious interviewer that interrogates the protagonists throughout the book which makes me think he is something like Phil Coulson in the Agents of SHIELD.

I am not a fan of big robots, because I feel it is a children tale, but this, this has gotten me far into thinking how would we react if we encounter a robotic hand that is enormous. The story tells how the world responds to it and how sensitive it would be in geopolitical sense. I remembered Alastair Reynold's novel of Blue Remembered Earth that ponders on one thought: "Are we, the homo sapiens, ready to react and respond as one true species or factious as ever?"

There is a point in the story that made me winched in pain. I cannot be revealing too much here, but it has something to do with human anatomy. I don't understand why the subject is so much willing to go for it. The robot is like the Ring in Lord of the Rings, luring all characters to it. And the ending, phew, I don't get it. It is such a twist!

Is this a fun book to read? Yes! It is a quick read, like I have mentioned. You will finish it in no time!