Fragment

by Warren Fahy

Book Overview

Jurassic Park meets Lost in this electrifying new adventure thriller. When the cast and crew of reality TV show 'SeaLife' land on picturesque, unexplored Henders Island it's a ratings bonanza. But... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553807536
• ISBN13: 9780553807530
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Surprised

I was very sceptical about reading this book when I saw the Jurrasic Park reference, but I gave it a shot anyway. Being a science and biology nerd really helped. It is out there, but the way it is presented kept me going until the very end. Thought provoking and entertaining all twisted into one.

Unanticipated Gem

This book was an unexpected read. I had never heard or read anything by Fahy, but will certainly search for future writings. Pure fantasy at times, but filled with interesting concepts and great storyline. Highly recommended for Sci-Fi and anyone who likes a good plot.

The Grand Tradition Continues

With sagging ratings, the ocean exploration reality show SeaLife desperately needs a boost before the network cuts their one-year voyage short. What could be better than answering a distress call on a mysterious island? Surrounded by a 700 ft cliff wall, Henders Island is largely inaccessible and its distance from the shipping lanes means very few seafarers have even seen it. But when a live broadcast of the landing shows the cast of the SeaLife eaten alive by the island's flora and fauna, the show is condemned as a hoax. Fortunately for readers, Henders Island is not a hoax. The two-mile wide island contains an ecosystem which has been isolated for hundreds of millions of years - with the resulting evolutionary divergence creating life which might as well be alien. Fearing that Henders Island might be weaponized, the president blockades the island and calls on an elite science team to explore it. What follows is a combination of scientific exploration and adventure which reads more like a missing Michael Crichton book than a debut novel. Warren Fahy handles scientific debate and thrilling chase sequences equally well, while giving us a cast of interesting characters. His greatest accomplishment, though, is bringing fresh ideas to a concept which stretches back to Jules Verne.

Okay, this blew me away...

I read all the reviews and thought, "well, okay, this looks like a pretty good summer book". Huh...I couldn't put it down (not to sound too cliche). I thoroughly enjoyed this and actually laughed out loud once or twice. It's not a preachy book, most of the characters are likeable, the premise seems possible and is handled with skill. My only question...how long do I have to wait for another book by this man?

Darwin's Nightmare

Warren Fahy pushes the theory of evolution to it's breaking point with his debut environmental thriller, Fragment. The book opens with the Trident, a 182 foot exploration ship scheduled to circle the globe in a year long journey to film a new cable reality show, Sea Life. At first the show's ratings soar but due to a series of storms, filming comes to a halt and the ratings go flat. That is until the crew stumbles onto a distress signal from a ship, one that has been lost for over three years. Nell Duckworth, the Trident's botanist is familiar with the area. She tells the crew that the island where the distress signal seems to be coming from has only been sighted three times in the past 200 years, with only one recorded landing in 1791. Cynthea, the producer of the reality show questions pursing the signal but as her career has had some bad breaks she sees this as a way to get it back on track. From this point on you might start to second guess the plot and think the the book is taking on a Jurassic Park theme but what Fahy hatches next is not a creation of man but of nature run amok. This book is the perfect read to escape with. I'd love to see Fragment as the next summer blockbuster. But for those naysayers who want more complex characters, more subplots, more whatever; your better off finding another book to read... but before you go would you please pass the popcorn? This book is too good to put down.

Fragment is a science-fiction gem!

Ever wonder what makes a book a "page-turner"? At times, it's that goading feeling of "Yeah, yeah, now get on with it already." But then there are those books that fill you with exhilaration and a frantic longing to discover what awaits around the next corner, what happens to those marvelous characters you've come to care so much about. Fragment, the scintillating science-fiction thriller by Warren Fahy, is the second sort of page-turner: literally every paragraph will draw you in and propel you along. Even better, when you reach the end, you'll have that feeling of not wanting it to stop, and probably - like I did - you'll flip back to the beginning and start the adventure again. The premise of Fragment is brilliant: a vibrant synthesis of contemporary 24/7 reality TV with time travel to a lost world worthy of Poe, Verne, or Burroughs - except far more frightening. All of the characters, of whatever species, are realized in exacting detail, as is the setting on Henders Island, home to creatures never seen by men (at least none who lived to tell the tale). So skillful is Mr. Fahy's writing that you will find yourself caught up in a movie inside your head, and you'll have the odd sensation of wanting to cover your eyes, yet peeking through your fingers so as not to miss anything. For all this feverish pace, however, there are moments when the author puts forward a fascinating idea that I wanted to pause and grapple with. Better yet, get together with a few bright friends and have a discussion. There is quite a lot of science in this work of fiction, and Mr. Fahy allows the reader to relish it (as do most of his central characters). This book positively exudes a reverence for nature: wide-eyed wonder tempered by respect for reason. Don't listen to those who sell short the reading public by suggesting they'll be put off by all that science stuff, nor to the sneering scientific "skeptics" who will argue over the plausibility: just remember this is Science Fiction in the best sense of both terms. Like all great fiction, this work also raises some truly global moral issues that are fresh and relevant as well as eternal. The human species' place in the cosmos is at the heart of the environmentalist debate. Fragment offers quite a lot of food for thought in this matter (I hope readers and the author will pardon the pun). Above all, I loved the characters in this novel: These are the sort of people that I would like to have as friends . . . and in fact, I do. They view the world as a place to explore, their work as a joy, and the fantastic as possible. Even in the most hopeless-seeming peril, they have the time of their lives. And so will you when you read Fragment.

An absolutely riveting page-turner

The first night I cracked open Warren Fahy's "Fragment," I ended up reading until 2 a.m. If that is not an indication of what you've got in store for you, I don't know what is. From the fictional (yet entirely factual) essay that opens the book to the prologue that gives us a glimpse of what is in store to the opening sequences that set the stage for the science thriller to come, "Fragment" hits all the right notes in all the right places. It all begins with the fantastic premise. We've got a remote island in the middle of the Pacific, isolated for hundreds of millions of years. The life that has evolved here is unlike anything else on Earth. Our first encounters with it ... do not go well. But we're human beings. We've GOT to study this stuff, right? So in we go with science teams and the military and the rest. From there we get pretty much what we expect, which is to say suspenseful thrills as we deal with the dangers of this island, intellectual brain food as Fahy tosses more science at us than a freshman course (yet in a way that will be friendly even to casual readers), and of course the bumbling civilian idiots who threaten to screw things up time and again. This is the kind of thriller that makes you feel smart; the sort of suspense book you just KNOW is going to make a great movie. Sure, sure, we've got our share of clichés. The blood-thirsty television producer, for instance, is a major one. And yes, we have to suspend out disbelief at times, such as the seeming lack of grief surrounding a fairly major event at the start of the book or the implausibility of the premise if we put too much thought into it. But this really doesn't matter. Putting too much thought into it destroys this awesome exploration of the diverging paths evolution can take. Fahy has crafted a science mystery with enough depth and believability that we can overlook these shortcuts and stay focused on the big science questions: What is on this island? What does the discovery mean for the world? In what varied directions could evolution have spun? And what the heck are those giant spider/tiger things? I was absorbed from the word go. Simply put, if you enjoy science-driven page-turning in the spirit of Michael Crichton and others, you'd be hard-pressed to go wrong with "Fragment".