Customer Reviews

Operation Lightning Strike

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nick Pope's involvement with the Ministry of Defence has equipped him with the insider knowledge to create an utterly captivating and scarily plausible account of an alien invasion of Earth. All the cabinet meetings, international diplomacy and descriptions of military countermeasures have a gritty air of authenticity about them. Furthermore, Pope skillfully weaves a thread of ambiguity as the tale unfolds, as to just who are the bad guys. Conspiracy theorists will love this! This makes for an ultimately more satisfying and complex read than many more conventional invasion-Earth type yarns. My only real criticism is that the breathtaking action scenes take rather a long time to appear and the intensive politicising in the early part of the book may not retain everyone's interest. Stick with it though and you will be rewarded with an awe-inspiring denouement that will remain with you for a long time. One small point that rankles a bit in the wake of the WTC atrocity is the author's claim that the threat of "jihad" against America was more imagined than real. As Operation Lightning Strike was written in 2000, however, Pope cannot be blamed for this tragically ironic but unintentional faux pas. Finally, a particular bonus for me was that much of the action set in England takes place close to my home. Perhaps I'll search the ground for UFO debris next time I visit Alice Holt Forest!

Once I opened this book I couldnt put it down, I feel it is a must read for any serious fan of the UFO phenomena.

A commendable and hopefully second part of a trilogy - Nick are you listening - we need to find out what happened. In the style of Operation Thunder Child (Nick's first novel), I suspect there is far more truth in this volume than the fictional tag would suggest. A must for all UFOlogists. This story brings to life more intrigue than any official will admit to - Read it!

Here's Nick Pope's follow-up to "Operation Thunder Child" in which we finally meet the aliens and discover the purpose behind the worldwide abduction program. It's an interesting thesis and a good plot, with many of the same characters from the earlier novel being further developed, plus a few new ones, and the plot thickened and deepened to an interesting conclusion which proves yes, the author really can write good and literate sci-fi.

This book has a more international focus with the participation of the major nuclear superpowers trying to come together to deal with the looming arrival of millions of aliens whose ultimate intentions are uncertain, plus some episodes of star-wars type combat-in-space made plausible by the deployment of existing NASA technologies. However just as interesting are the plot twists revealing political skulduggery and ambiguities about who in fact the good guys really are. The scenario is believable, once you accept the reality of the abduction program - which due to his time working in government at the MOD and what he learned there, the author obviously does.

Nick does intimate personal writing about characters coping with the loss of friends surprisingly well. He proves himself a humanitarian writer with deep feeling for the human condition, which comes as something of a surprise.

Interesting ending to the story, Nick: the antithesis of Hollywood, perhaps initially less than satisfying, but the more I thought about it, the more appropriate and right it became. Of course, you'll have to read it to find out what happens.

Like "Thunder Child" this book had a good print run in a couple of editions, and you can pick up a good copy easily. It's well written, and a good read.