Review: Salvation Reigned by Travis James Peterson

Unhinged, unfiltered, and unrelenting in its social commentary, Salvation Reigned by Travis James Peterson is a frightening vision of a species that has reached its tipping point.

A rogue planet is on a collision course with Earth, and the highest halls of power learn that humanity only has a decade before annihilation. Unfortunately, those same halls are filled with supercharged charlatans and corporate sellouts, stooges for the Global Corporate Conglomerate and its insatiable hunger for profits.

The President is an ignorant narcissist with a god complex, blindly determined to blow the offending rock out of the sky with every nuke in the world’s arsenal, or with an experimental black hole weapon that just might rip a hole in spacetime itself. Meanwhile, the number of people casting off their humanity to become muck-dwelling Ferals is growing, but these “animals” may be more organized than anyone expected, and could represent the planet’s last hope for redemption.

In the center of this looming catastrophe and eventual Wasteland are Pete, Marla, and Jack – doomed residents of the Last Great City, cycling through fresh iterations in their replacement bodies. They are destined to repopulate the planet, and potentially seed the stars, if only they could remember that mission whenever they’re brought back to life. A witness to this all, persisting through space and time among the blasted remains of the planet, is the weary Cybernaut, cursed as both prophet and historian.

With a dizzying display of reality-distorting rhetoric, this ambitious and hard-edged read is a breathless plunge to the edge of sanity, defying linear sense and expectations of any genre. It isn’t hard to read between the lines of this brash novel to find its caustic critique of modern culture, particularly the United States’ descent into incompetence and corruption on the world stage. Under late-stage capitalism, the resuscitated belief that “might makes right” and the desperate clawing for control of resources and land before the end of the world is not a far-flung fiction, and Peterson drills down on that harsh reality.

The story leaps back and forth in timeline-defying fits and starts, plunging readers into the novel’s chaotic context without much explanation or expositional hand-holding. This is both immersive and intimidating, especially with the melange of sci-fi tech, fictional history, and buckshot style of storytelling. While the book may be classified by some as unpolished and impolite satire, its divination of America’s decadent fall feels poignant and crafted with precision.

Climate disaster and the willful degradation of a livable planet are also interwoven themes that crackle with allegorical importance. In the midst of this mad ramble of prose, there are dozens of gut-punch lines that shine like beacons of meaning and dire prophecy; these gems are tucked away in the slurry of descriptive language and purposeful dialogue, so a close read is required to savor the best moments.

There are scattered grammatical and technical errors, and the choppy, blunt writing can be taxing – some more clausal complexity and variety in the prose would help the story flow more smoothly, and the dystopian satire hit harder. Despite these minor weak points, this blunt-force parable of survival, rebellion, and the power of second chances is a distressingly prophetic read.