Review: Sentient, by Michael Nayak

Book Description

Extinction Horizon meets Contagion in this sequel to 2025’s sci-fi thriller Symbiote, where the biological threat has escaped the South Pole and is now wreaking havoc upon Antarctica. 

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The survivors of the South Pole massacre will find that getting off the Antarctic continent may cost them their lives…

Months after the events of Symbiote, sunrise has come to the ice continent, bringing with it the beginning of the annual tourist season. where 1,500 summer visitors will soon call the coastal McMurdo Station home. With them are the architects of the classified CIA program that unleashed the deadly microbes, who are determined to uncover what happened with their experiment and harvest samples of the mutation to turn into a biological weapon.

However, when Ben Jacobs returns from an impossible journey to the Pole and is reunited with Penny – an asymptomatic carrier of the symbiotic microbes – all hell breaks loose. When the sea ice surrounding the station becomes a fertile breeding ground for a new and more dangerous infestation, Rajan Chariya and his friends will have to join forces with the CIA to fight the onslaught of infected “sea people” roving the streets. With tensions high and stakes even higher, the question becomes when will the group stop being useful, and start becoming targets who know too much?

Worse, there may be more than one asymptomatic carrier….

With a heart-stopping pace and twists that will leave readers breathless, Sentient is a thrilling sequel that brilliantly combines all the best horror tropes with real world scenarios.

My Review

Thanks to April at Angry Robot for organising this blog tour and for my copy of the book. I had planned to publish this review on or before the publication date but then I got an email about a tour, so I’ve waited until today to publish it. I was looking forward to this book because I enjoyed Symbiote so much, and I can’t wait for the next book.

Beware, here be mad scientists…

We return to the South Pole as Summer starts to arrive. The six survivors are hoping for rescue, but what arrives is a death squad. After some bargaining and locking people in the sauna, arrangements are made to get almost everyone back to McMurdo on Ross Island.

However, things might have already gone sideways there, because the original carrier of the grey symbiotes strain has arrived in McMurdo and nobody realises just how bad things are going to get. The CIA need to hide their experiment in biological warfare and everyone in Antarctica is in trouble, because the President is compromised and they can’t let him know Russia was the original target.

After all’s said and done, hundreds are dead, and 8 people make it out. And back to the South Pole.

There are explosions. Several actually.

I am really trying not to tell you everything that happens because suspense! But, Rajan, Siri and Keyon, our heroes from Symbiote survive events but are back at the South Pole, in the Antarctic Summer this time. How they get there is a big, violent adventure with secret agents, mutating microbes, a journalist determined to get the story out and murderous penguins. Yes, that’s right, penguins.

The tension ratchets up as the blue sentients attack McMurdo Station under the control of a surviving grey symbiote. There are other latent greys out there and at the right time, they’re unleashed. The Polies and the CIA murder squad are forced to team up to fight the sentients and then when it all looks dire, they might have a way out. With a final dash across the snow in a big red bus to an airfield, there’s hope for survival. A plane is waiting fuelled up and ready to head to New Zealand. They just have to get through the penguins.

The pacing is perfect! The evocation of Antarctica and the life of research station crews is wonderful. I could really feel the cold and the boredom of winter over crews as the booze runs out and they wait to be relieved in summer, the frenetic pace of Winfly season as new people start to arrive and everything needs organising. The slowly returning light and increasing warmth, the sudden storms that drop the temperature, the impossible distances, it all adds to the texture of the novel and the tension of the events unfolding. Nayak’s experiences as a Polie, soldier and scientist are really present and embedded in the novel. The Author’s Note is particularly interesting for those interested in the real DARPA and life at the Pole.

The blend of science and horror, with a background of real-world politics, is brilliant, compulsive reading.

Bold of Nayak to suggest the President will live until November 2028 though…

The series is shaping up to be great, and I need to know what happens next. Clearly something momentous, because throughout the book we are treated to excerpts from a future (2047) book based on the writings of a journalist who was there.

I read the entire novel on one sitting. Must recommend to fans of sci fi thrillers, cli-fi and bioterrorism thrillers, and military adventures.

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Michael Nayak

Mikey was born in Los Angeles and now lives in Washington D.C.; he has worked as a planetary scientist, pilot and skydiving instructor, and most recently as a Program Manager with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He has logged 1,000+ hours of flight time in 30+ aircraft including the F-16, T-38 and BE-76, is a US Air Force Test Pilot School graduate, and former NASA Space Shuttle engineer.

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