What if you received a video showing exactly what happened to Amelia Earhart?

And then similar videos of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Tulsa Race Massacre? What would you do if historians and experts verified every detail, and none of the videos showed traces of CGI?

If you’re Rich Penton, lead reporter at the investigative news show, RECON, you’d try to figure out who made the videos, who sent them to you and what you’re supposed to do about them. The only thing you’d know for sure is that the existence of the videos is absolutely impossible.

For humans.

But when the RECON team receives a video showing Chicago destroyed by an asteroid in the near future, they decide they’d better take it seriously. That’s when they feel the full force of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which clearly don’t want RECON involved in whatever mess this is, and the Russians send an assassin to ensure that anybody who tries to broadcast the videos winds up dead.

Perun’s Hammer blends exciting and contemporary AI, foreign intrigue, murder, historical mysteries, hazardous asteroids, undercover agents, a bizarre cult, and a mysterious intelligence that seems to be able to see through time.

My Review:

It begins with the impossible delivery of an equally impossible video – even if all that Rich Penton and his crew at RECON are certain of at that point is that the delivery shouldn’t have been possible. The video looks like REALLY good CGI of a meteor crashing into downtown Chicago. RECON is a successful, award-winning news magazine TV series (sorta/kinda like 60 Minutes was back in the day) but based in Chicago and set in the mid-2020s.

Meaning that the team at RECON is used to getting unusual pitches for stories. And that they know all about cutting-edge CGI. But it also means that their network security is state-of-the-art, a state that means that videos should not be capable of ‘magically’ appearing in anyone’s email without getting checked. And it certainly means that once such an email is deleted – it STAYS deleted.

Except this video isn’t behaving the way it’s supposed to.

Not that they can do anything with it or about it except for the security breach. There’s nothing attached to tell them who sent it, how it was filmed, or what the purpose of it might be. They assume it’s a pitch for something – they get those all the time, but usually with a lot more information than this.

Then the second video arrives, just as mysteriously as the first. A video that seemed to have been taken at the Battle of the Little Big Horn as it was happening. In 1876. A video that checks out in every particular except one. In spite of repeated attempts to figure out how it was made, there is ZERO evidence of it being CGI. It seems to be authentic right down to facial recognition of even minor characters – even the angle of the sun and shadows is not just internally consistent but consistent with the date, time and location of the battle.

Which is when Rich and his team at RECON start to really, really dig. Because one way or another, this is one hell of a story. But as videos keep coming in, from Amelia Earhart’s ultimately fatal crash in 1937 to the horrors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the tragic 1945 bombing of three German ships, the Deutschland, the Thielbek, and the Cap Arcona, filled to the gunwales with Jewish concentration camp inmates who were either killed by British bombs, or from being clubbed to death by Nazi soldiers and sympathizers waiting for the few survivors to wash up on shore.

As each of the later videos gets a YES in the column for historical accuracy and a NO in the column for being provably some sort of advanced CGI, it brings questions about the purpose of that first video of a meteor or asteroid striking Chicago, into terrible focus. If all the other videos are real recordings of historical events, then what was that first video? Was it a warning?

And if it was a warning – can they get the right people to believe in something so seemingly impossible in time to change the future before it becomes the present?

Escape Rating B+: First of all, in the interests of full disclosure, I received this book in a “friend of a friend of a friend” situation. Which I was honestly a bit salty about as I’m not all that fond of being committed to things by proxy.

Howsomever, (knowing this will completely undercut any and all arguments with the friend who got me into this), I’m not at all sorry about the whole thing. In fact, I’m pretty damn pleased with the result now that I’ve finished the book – and in spite of the quibbles I’m going to throw in near the end.

I had a damn good time reading this. Seriously. It was a thrill-a-minute ride from beginning to end in the best sorta/kinda SF movie thriller tradition. Movies like Armageddon, and Deep Impact.

What made Perūn’s Hammer just a bit different, and a whole lot more fun from this reader’s perspective, is that the story is set recognizably in Chicago. Not New York, not Washington DC, but Chicago. As someone who lived in Chicago for several years, I could picture all the scenes in the story AND just how big the devastation would be.

Which leads directly to the second fun thing. In most disaster movies, the disaster has either already happened or is past the point of no return. A big part of the plot and the point of Perūn’s Hammer is that those videos represent a future that ‘might’ be, not a fixed point in time. The worst of the crisis could be averted – if humanity can get its act together in time.

So the story isn’t the dystopia that comes after, or even the planning vs. panic scenario of an inevitable onrushing catastrophe. Instead, the ticking clock that drives the action is the investigation to figure out the nature of the message and then the mad scramble to act BEFORE it’s too late.

Neither of which could possibly be the job of a single human being – so even though parts of the story are told from Rich Penton’s first person perspective – which admittedly cuts the tension a bit because we know he survived otherwise he wouldn’t be around afterwards to do that telling – much of the story is told from a third person overview in order to follow the workings of the stellar team that make the show – and this story – possible.

Their team dynamic is absolutely top-notch. Each person is at the top of their respective game, and they each do their part to solve the mystery. It’s going to be up to Rich to convince the powers-that-be to put a multibillion dollar asset into space in the hopes of knocking the object off course. But he needs their collective very able assistance to put it all together and the investigation in all its many facets is a joy to follow.

Unfortunately, this is where my two huge quibbles with the story come in, and together they were enough to knock this from an A grade to a B+. Because I was compelled, but also extremely annoyed at this part.

In order for the reader – and the team – to truly appreciate just how high the stakes are in this story, one of the team members had to die. That’s the way thrillers like this work and it wasn’t exactly a shock for the reader when it happened. Especially considering that as far as solving the mystery goes, this particular team member had already completed their role. The problem I had with this was not the death, but the choice of character to die. The team member who was killed was the only gay person in the central cast, and the only character who was not or did not become part of a romantic couple. The “Bury Your Gays” trope is basically a cheap shot that did not need to be part of this story. Or, for that matter, any story.

It also leads directly to my other issue with the story, and that’s ‘villain fail’. There is a villain here. They’re not the ones who launched the object, but they are the ones trying to take advantage of it. In the international political climate of the past few years, the idea that the Russian Federation might be gleeful about an interstellar object flattening Chicago isn’t quite out of the bounds of plausibility. That Russia would engage in a campaign of misinformation and bribery in order to prevent the US from launching countermeasures in time is also not that far-fetched. Nor is the idea that they would have agents in the U.S. working to protect such a plan. However, the idea that all of that happened AND that the specific agent involved embodied all the worst possible racist, homophobic, sexist, psychopathic, sociopathic, violent and outright ‘bwahaha’ villain characteristics that have ever been assigned to a negative portrayal of an enemy agent in a single person put the whole thing way over the top and tripped my willing suspension of disbelief completely. To make a long harangue into a short sentence, the character of the villain of the piece slipped WAY over the line from CHARACTER into CARICATURE.

Very much on my other, and much more fascinated hand, I loved the deep dive into the historical incidents that were part of the vetting process for the videos. I wanted to say ‘happy’, but that’s the wrong word in this case. The historical analysis read as in-depth and extremely well done, which is something that I always love to see. However, I think it is important to note that all of the historical incidents with the exception of Amelia’s Earhart’s most likely sad end, were all true events that were horrifying in the extreme. They were also outright brutal tragedies of human inhumanity to other humans that were swept under the historical carpet because the victims were considered “other” from the perspective of the powers that be at the time.

A lot of the SFnal aspects of Perūn’s Hammer have been done before, in stories that reach as far back as Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer through Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series and all the way up to last year’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye by way of at least two of the Star Trek movies (TMP and IV) as well as those disaster thrillers I started with.  Those familiar SFnal elements blend into a story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, whether the parts that appeals are the historical mysteries, the technical breakthroughs, the political shenanigans and the spy games, or the surprisingly open-ended conclusion.

In spite of my quibbles, I had a grand time with Perūn’s Hammer. I think those quibbles hit so hard BECAUSE I was having such a grand reading time and those flaws disappointed me in a book that was otherwise really terrific.

All of which means that I’m glad that the author has already promised a sequel, tentatively titled Perūn Rises. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.