The Future Happens Twice: The Perennial Project
Matt Browne
Athena Press, 720 pages, $23.95, ISBN: 9781844018307
reviewed by Barry Hunter.

This is the first novel in a trilogy that presents an unusual plan for the continuation of the human race and the colonization of the stars. The story is 42,000 years in the telling and Browne makes it interesting and well written.

A group of children are on a starship on a mission to populate an Earth like planet eighty-two light years from Earth. There were all born on the ship sixteen years prior and are raised by two androids. Only the children don’t know that their “parents” are androids or that they were genetically picked for the journey and they don’t know the true location of their ship

Debyra Handsen leaves her university post in order to help with a linguistic problem with the government in a top secret research facility in Nevada. Her job is to revise the linguistic kernel for androids that are in year 16 of a simulated space mission. Other cast members find out that they are twins to people who are thirty or more year’s older and genetic matches to others as well. Investigations into their true history and the government cover ups make for excellent reading.

There is a large cast of characters and Browne pays attention to all of them to fill in the details. He has written an interesting novel and with the characters and plot proves that THE FUTURE HAPPENS TWICE. He is working on the follow up novels HUMAN DESTINY and THE ANDROMEDA ENCOUNTER