Have you ever read a book and just ended up seriously confused? This doesn’t typically happen for me but with Terratron – Gods of Mars by Nathaniel Bernadau that did. The book opens with humanity contemplating ways to colonize space which leads to the creation of semi-sentient self-replicating terraforming robots. This leads to the formation of some of the earliest colonies, specifically the colonization and rise of civilization on Mars. It then transitions to discussing the various events after space colonization that led to the general lawlessness that plagues the solar system and rise of space pirates that terrorize the different colonies. In doing so it discusses the rise to prominence of several specific space pirates such as Jarga Veth. As a consequence of the rise of the space pirates there is also a rise in interplanetary religion, specifically a religion focused around the idea of a savior that will come and save everyone from the general lawlessness by creating a space empire and taking over as the emperor. This transitions to discussing Teppin Kennesit, a military hero of Mars, who is able to help convince the various human colonies and civilizations to band together and create a unified government with him eventually being elected the first emperor of the galactic empire.
I want to start off by saying this book seems to have had a decent premise on which it was built. An epic novel that covers everything from the first colonization of space to the early stages of the galactic empire. The problem I have though is this book has extremely little continuity it feels like. It opens with the creation of the semi-sentient self-replicating terraforming robots. However, as part of that section it also briefly touches on how these robots seem to be potentially controlled by some other entity. Then this section ends with no further discussion of the robots or this mysterious entity and instead jumps straight into covering the early stages of Mars Colonization with no indication of the time frame between the two. The Mars Colonization seems to be fragmentary as there is little straight forward linearity here as it seems to go back and forth in time with little indication of possible timescale for the colonization. This continues when it jumps to discussing the rise of the space pirates as again there seems to be extremely little information provided for the potential timescale as a frame of reference. There seems to be no way of knowing how long these periods of time last or how long of a time there was between them which makes the story difficult to follow, at least for me. It jumps from the space pirates and the rising religion straight into the early formation of the empire but there is no coverage of what happened to the space pirates and how they were subdued. For the space empire stage of the story there is again little information that would provide a clear timescale and at times what is provided seems contradictory. Sometimes it references decades passing but then seems to also imply that it has only been a few years so I really just ended up confused throughout. There also seems to be little clarity on just how large this empire is. It repeatedly states that the empire covers almost the entire galaxy but it only directly seems to reference people and places from within the solar system which seems contradictory. Like I said earlier, it seems like it has a good premise but it also seems to not be well thought out as there is a lack of concreteness that would have really helped solidify the setting and potential timeframe of the story. As much as I would like to give this story a potentially higher rating I am only giving it two out of five stars due to my massive confusion while reading this.
As you have probably gathered this book is a work of science-fiction so it would probably hold the most appeal to readers who prefer that genre. More specifically it would probably hold a lot of appeal to readers who like books based in space, such as Star Wars or something similar. I highly doubt it would hold a lot of appeal for readers who don’t already enjoy that kind of work. It is primarily aimed at adults but outside of some violence there is little that would potentially make it unsuitable for young adult or teen readers. If you do decide to try it feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. This book was acquired through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.