Book Review - Devil Colony

I was so happy to have my Kobo while we were camping on the weekend - while it's definitely more fragile than a book, it is also much lighter and is like carrying your entire library with you. In my case, over 150 novels. I was excited to start the latest Sigma novel by James Rollins.

To be clear, Rollins is one of my favourite authors. I have read every single one of the Sigma novels and a couple of his others novels besides. This guy is a genius. He writes science fiction based on a group called Sigma. They describe themselves as scientists with guns, and they are. Rollins ties together religion, science, history, military action, and a little bit of romance just to keep it interesting. It's usually about some imminent threat to the world. His writing is just phenomenal. Devil Colony is no different.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read below the jump if you are planning to read this novel and don't want to know details about what happens.

Each of Rollins' books is based on a real scientific concept, usually paired with a real natural phenomenon. In Devil Colony, it is the current research and development being done in the nanotechnology field. The Sigma team discovers an ancient nanobot that denatures matter on a molecular level - it literally dissolves everything is comes in contact to to individual atoms. The only way to destroy the nanobots is to heat them to super-high temperatures. As a protective measure, the society that created them has stored them above spots of geothermal or volcanic activity. The nanobots become unstable and active when they are cooled, so when a scientist tries to remove a cache of them from their storage place, they explode. This explosion lights the wicks of other storage areas in the world, one of which sits on top of Yellowstone National Park in the US.

The natural phenomenon in this book is that Yellowstone is a large geothermic hotspot sitting on top of a vast supervolcano. If Yellowstone ever has a massive eruption, the ash cloud could/probably would cause a decades long cold spell when the sun couldn't reach the Earth. It would result in a large number of deaths, possibly to the point of wiping out humanity. The last supervolcano eruption was almost 80,000 years ago in Sumatra. So basically, the plotline of the book is that they need to determine the source of the eruption, then the location of the stores, and then how to contain the eruption.

Meanwhile, the entire time they're fighting against the Guild, who are the bad guys throughout the whole Sigma series. The Guild wants to find the nanobots and use them as a weapon.

The religious/historical connection here is that the technology was brought to North America by a tribe of Mormons exiled from Egypt. They were considered white Indians and made pacts with the founders of the US to be the fourteenth US colony - a Devil colony. But the Guild slaughtered the elders that were part of the treaty and it fell through.

Anyways, I could go on for pages with the details of this book, given that everything is fairly complex and interrelated. But instead, you should just read it. If you like science or technology, you will love all of Rollins' books. Seriously entertaining.