Customer Reviews

Fragment: A Novel

5 star:		(101)
4 star:		(65)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

It is hard to find the words to express how much I enjoyed this novel. Arguably it has flaws. I don't care; I LOVED it! Here's hoping this inventive debut is the first of many, many best-sellers from Mr. Fahy!

After a couple of prologues, Fragment opens with an American research ship coming to remote, unexplored Henders Island. The Trident, actually the setting for a semi-educational reality television show, had planned to bypass tiny Henders when an emergency beacon coming from the island turned it around. Botanist Nell Duckworth gets separated from the rest of the landing party when she spies some highly unusual plant life on the beach. The others move on, inland to the jungle. Nothing is like anything these scientists and crew members have ever seen before, and they're broadcasting live as they go. Within steps, all hell breaks lose. There are screams. Cameras drop. There is confusion everywhere. The network breaks the feed. Back stateside and around the world the debate begins: Did you see Sealife? Was that a hoax?

Only one cameraman makes it back to the beach, chased by enormous, eight-legged, red-furred monsters. To Nell, they look like spiders crossed with tigers--spigers. She and Zero, the cameraman, barely escape with their lives. Cut to a few days later... The United States Navy has warships ringing the island. There is a complete media blackout. Agencies ranging from NASA to the U.S. Army have been brought in to get a team of scientists safely onto Henders to study this island ecosystem which diverged from our own evolutionary path more than 250 million years ago.

Does that sound far-fetched to you? If Fahy has a strength, it's taking real science and using it to make the most implausible of plots utterly believable. That's not fair, actually. Mr. Fahy has many strengths, the first of which is a wildly inventive imagination. On Henders he's created an entire world, right here in the midst of our own. Another of his strengths is pacing. I read this novel in a day. From the opening chapter he had me hooked, but as I rapidly approached the dénouement, I literally could not turn the pages fast enough. Fragment started out fast-paced, and just got faster and tenser without ever flagging. As for plotting, yes, some elements of this novel are derivative. Already comparisons to Jurassic Park are flying around, and surely Mr. Fahy owes a huge debt to Michael Crichton, mostly, I'm guessing, for inspiration. He is not retreading the same old territory here. I could guess where some of the plot elements were going, but I could never guess what would happen when we got there. He blew me away every single time.

What are his weaknesses? Well, one is the sheer amount of science he's relaying to his readers. I LIVE for that stuff, but that can't be said of the average lay reader. I think he does as well as anyone, but it's still a lot of science to exposit. The greater weakness is character development. Some of the characters were straight out of central casting, and time and time again, Fahy passed up opportunities to, for instance, make a bad guy more complex and less of a caricature. Most characters were not terribly fleshed out, and some may have acted inconsistently. And do you know what? I don't care. Sure, that one element could have been stronger, but in no way did it take away from my enjoyment of this novel.

If this is fledgling author Fahy's first effort, I can't wait to see his follow-up! Fragment is a wild ride, but more than anything else it is just so much fun!

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.

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.

The idea of a lost island that has been left untouched by the rest of earth for billions of years is what drew me to this book in the first place. I was hoping that it wouldn't be another Jurassic Park -- and it wasn't.

"Fragment" doesn't take long to get the action started and once it starts it doesn't really stop. Suspense hangs over every chapter and there is an urgent dark foreboding that makes the story feel like a countdown to very bad things to come. I was hooked.

Fahy does a pretty good job of explaining the science by weaving it into the story, though there were a few times when I felt like there was a little too much scientific explanation when I really just wanted to see what was going to happen next. I did, however, love that Fahy doesn't leave unexplained plot holes. Things that didn't quite make sense or seemed too coincidental at first were explained later on, putting to rest a few nagging questions I had (such as how an island like this could go unnoticed and unexplored for so long given satellite technology).

This is a great book and I think fans of Michael Crichton's work will like Warren Fahy's work. I'm anxious to see what he has in store for us next.

What a wild ride of a book! The action begins on a ship, the Trident, which has been chartered by the producer of a reality show called SeaLife. It features a cast of young twenty-something scientists including Nell Duckworth, who wanted to be on the show in the hope of exploring the ecosystem of a mysterious island known as Henders Island out in the middle of the Pacific. She gets her wish as the ship picks up a distress signal from an EPIRB and the captain is asked to go to try to give assistance. All of this, of course, is being filmed. As they get to the island, the cast and a cameraman make their way up to the top, and, as the cameras are rolling, something awful and incredible happens. The footage that is viewed all around the world sparks an incredible controversy around whether or not the whole thing was a hoax. Our government, however, has to see for itself, and only days later Nell and a team of specially-picked scientists are landed on top of the island in vehicles and a lab specially built for NASA. What they discover could alter the course of our world as we know it. I will not, absolutely not, say anything more, because it will kill the suspense for anyone else who might want to read it.

There is a lot of nonstop action in this book, and once I started it, I literally could not put it down. The suspense keeps you going until the end. The characters are a bit stereotypical -- the producer, who doesn't care about anything else but getting the footage, the quirky scientist, the fame-grabbing, pop-culture, vengeful toad of a pseudo-scientist who knows if word gets out about the truth of the island it's all over for his career -- but it's the author's first novel so you can make allowances. Also, some of the dialogue gets a bit clunky at time, but trust me, you'll be so carried away by the action here that you won't mind. Finally, toward the end it gets a bit into the "cutesy" range that normally kills a book for me, but considering the book as a whole, it's awesome. There is a lot of scientific jargon here, but it's easy to understand once you slow down and read carefully. I'm not a scientist, so I don't know if it's accurate, but I was more interested in the action anyway.

All in all, this is a fun read that raises some serious environmental issues. As noted, it is the author's first novel, and if he keeps writing like this, he will gain a lot of followers. I'd definitely recommend it to people who like science fiction, or to those who read books like Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.

Haven't you ever wondered if there are still undiscovered islands on earth and what life they contain? What if the ecosystem of an island on earth was isolated from all mankind since the beginning of life? Warren Fahy describes that island, and it's the island of your nightmares. Most of the deadly inhabitants are all the creeping, crawling, stinging, biting creatures we usually shrink from except these islanders are a combination of the worst of insects, crabs, rats, etc., all rolled up into new species. When a TV crew and a group of scientists get sidetracked to the island, there's free lunch for the natives.

The scientists throw in plenty of facts and hypotheses to give credence to the creatures. Some of the ideas that play out in the book are: Why were these creatures isolated only to this island? What would happen if these aggressive species were accidently carried back to civilization? Did any benign, intelligent life evolve on the island, and what would happen if it was brought back and introduced?

The book jacket makes a comparison to Jurassic Park and The Ruins, and life on the island could have come right out of Alien. Yes, there are similarities, but it's still a good wild ride. I also liked the loose ending that left you wondering.

I enjoyed this author's first attempt. A mix of action,mystery and science(a little Chrictonistic with the science; glad i had a background with some biology). It did remind me of Jurassic Park with different creatures thrown in. I have to agree with someones comments about the lack of character development. I would have liked to have known more about the characters and a smidgeon less about the science.
I would recommend this as a beach/summer read. I hope mr. Fahy will stick with similar genre though. I know his second novel is due out in 2010 and i will be looking for info on it.....

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".

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.

you will enjoy this book. I also see some flavors of The Ruins as well, and I believe that both books are mentioned in the editorial review.

Someone else mentioned that this book had a lot of gratuitous sexual innuendo, and foul language. I am not sure if we read the same book. Yes, there is some foul language, but when you see a good friend of yours being ripped apart by alien creatures, does 'dang' really cut it? Nope...didn't think so. The language is entirely appropriate in the context of this book.

The premise is simple...a reality show about life at sea, finds an island that has only been mentioned once in written history. A distress beacon is sent from this island and the 'reality show ship' is asked to check it out. What happens is a nightmare, and the author Warren Fahy, does a good job of bringing us into that nightmare. Since the reality show is at the basis of the book, it makes sense that that 'producers' of the show want some romance, some drama, etc...which is where yoru sexual innuendo comes in. It isn't graphic, it isn't overly long, and again, it isn't out of context with the book.

There is a lot of science in here, but if you pay attention it isn't anything someone with a sixth grade education couldn't understand or at least 'get.' The descriptions are well done, though they can get convoluted at times, so pay attention.

One thing I did get a kick out of was the 'excerpts' from the field guide that three of the characters supposedly write. Complete with illustrations! When I saw those I was wanting more...they were a fun way to bring the creatures to life.

This isn't a book to take seriously, it had a lot of interesting information, but you do need to think outside the box a bit. This was a great beach book, and I could see this being turned into an awesome action movie.