This is Futurum, Death’s Hollow, and where they’re going, there is no mercy.

Jacks is a corporate extraction operative with a well-honed team. His goal is to survive while they collect whatever industrial secret, agent, or turncoat executive needs removing from under the noses of AstEx’s main competitors.

That is until the mission of a lifetime falls into his team’s lap, promising more money than they could possibly imagine.

The target? An organic object known as the heartseed, prized by an alien race, that grows on a hostile planet.

The remit? Four corporate squads all competing for the same target, and to the winners, exclusive access to alien technology.

The catch? Six months, one hundred and fourteen teams of lost souls, ninety-three dropships, and the highest echelon of military technology, yet no one has ever come back from Futurum alive.

Time is running out, and where they’re going, everything wants to kill, eat, or lay its eggs inside you. Possibly all three.

But Jacks’ greatest enemy could be his own mind as the creeping malevolence of the planet worms its way in. As his reality fractures, he begins to question what the aliens really want, and whether this world will ever let it go.

This is a team deathmatch on a world that rejects contact. Think Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer meets Battle Royale, where the planet is more dangerous than the competitors.

Fun book. Moves fast and features some very interesting characters. And monsters. I was perhaps not the ideal audience for this book, but nonetheless there were many aspects I enjoyed.

The jungle behind loomed in his mind, as if it bore witness and hated what it saw. He knew he’d come to regret it.

If you watched James Cameron’s Avatar, when the avalanche of alien wildlife rushes towards the corporate mercs, perhaps you sat back and said to yourself - bloody hell, I am glad I am not on the receiving end of that! Nick Snape asks you to hold his beer. Look closely before you take a sip though, you don’t want whatever’s in there getting inside of you.

“Incoming … insects, rats, fucking everything!” he shouted into comms, and the tsunami of legs and tails tumbled over the edge, either failing to grip or being shoved from behind by those more desperate.

Our protagonist is an ex-military operative contracted by a corporate to retrieve a mysterious alien artifact from a planet from which nobody has yet returned. The blurb may lead you to believe this to be a video-game style hack-and-slash adventure, but from Nick’s past books I had expected it to delve into some deeper themes as well, and the story delivers on both fronts. There is some great action, and Jackson’s own mind is just as much of a dangerous fragmented quagmire of forgotten and erased memories, as is the alien biome he is dispatched into. The presentation weaves in his last military campaign in the UK with his present as a corporate exfiltrator. I didn’t enjoy the back and forth as much, but as we approached the end, I began to appreciate the role it played in establishing him as the ideal candidate for what lies ahead.

He’d just listened to an alien, possibly the first to contact humanity, and they spoke corporate language better than the human execs.

Quite a bit of effort and focus has gone into distinguishing a contemplative, astute extractor/infiltrator/path-finder profile from that of a marine/merceneray type who just wants to get to their target, slashing and burning their way through whatever stands in their way. I see the parallel with protagonists from Nick’s past books. It was also interesting to see his infatuation with ethereal phantom companions carries over in what I believe is its third reincarnation, this time with an alien flavor.

‘Yes,’ said the apparition, which flickered between dreadful, wrapped roots and the woman he’d once loved.

Assimilation is a topic that is very close to my heart, and I liked the treatment here. I did feel that the author’s focus on military action and character development somewhat starves the book of the world-building potential the premise deserved. I would have wanted a more detailed account of the Stullah and their past. I also had a theory it would connect with the aliens we see in his Scorching novella, but the story didn’t quite go in that direction. Having said that, I enjoyed what I got, especially little details like how the fauna that sustains itself on the assimilated flora grows more intelligent (and consequently vindictive) as a side effect. The last 20% was where the book truly shined for me.

All in all it’s a great package. If you enjoy guns-blazing mandibles-clicking horns-racing action with characters you can root for, try this out.

“I’m not a killer,” he said, but that wasn’t the whole truth anymore.