The 6th Extinction - James Rollins (A Sigma Force Novel)

The 6th Extinction by James Rollins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In his latest Sigma Force book, Rollins has a lot to deliver, with the Guild (A Sigma adversary since the very first book) now smashed and gone for good, the Sigma Force is now without any adversaries. So what could be better than a mass global destruction, an Armageddon whose countdown has started... The only catch is nobody is aware that the countdown has started.

James Rollins has always amazed me as a writer who can take multiple events from the history and string together a believable tale of conspiracy, destruction and sheer terror out of it. The fact that’s scary is it is almost plausible. The line between truth and fiction blurs and as a reader you are left wondering what is truth and what is fiction.

The 6th Extinction does something similar, the plot starts off in the year 1832 with Charles Darwin – the scientist who gave us the theory of evolution embarking on a voyage to the Antarctica and happening to chance across a map made by the primitives on the island describing an uncharted and previously unknown mysterious land.

As the voyagers turns to map and glorify themselves by discovering an unknown and unclaimed piece of land for themselves, they encounter something sinister and horrendous, so much so that they decide to destroy all the records of landing on the mysterious island and all knowledge of what happened on it… all the pieces except for an ancient map showing the unclaimed land as Darwin cannot bring himself to destroy it… A map which…..

Current year April 27th a very chilling and clear message comes from a secret US testing site in the mines outside of Bodie an old ghost town in California, “This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There’s been a breach. Fail-safe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us . . . kill us all.”

What ties Charles Darwin to a small ghost town in California, the Sigma Force team heads out on the quest? Led by Painter Crowe and Lisa Cummings from Bodie, Kathryn Bryant co-coordinating all activities from Washington D.C and Commander Gray leading the action from Antarctica, the team battles outstanding odds, trying to unravel the threads of a plan to create a new Eden – A Dark Eden.

The novel tackles the real schism currently found in the environmental movement: between old-school conservationists and a new breed of ecologist, between preservationists and synthetic biologists, even between those who want to stop this pending extinction and those who welcome it.

Genetic experimentation is a truth, which continues without a lot of oversight is also a frightening reality. With all the progress happening in technology, using computers and advanced programs to decode billions of bits of data, it will not be long before somebody working on bio-experimentation stumbles upon something that will open a new age Pandora’s box, one I am afraid that we will not able to close in time….