Twin Planets
Reviewed date: 2013 Apr 2
Rating: 1
159 pages
Agents from Firma snatch mild-mannered Richard Denning from his cozy, apathetic life on Earth and transport him to Firma. Denning meets his genetic counterpart, Mark Liston, and learns that Firma is an alternate-universe Earth. A secretive race of aliens has conquered Firma, altered its rotation to make it tidally locked with the Sun. The aliens strictly control any technology that might be weaponized, so the clandestine revolutionaries create two secret weapons using the only tool left: genetics.
Denning and Liston are those weapons.
So far Twin Planets is just crummy science fiction, but now it gets out of hand. Denning and Liston unlock their genetic superpowers. Their abilities include:
- Super strength
- Super speed
- Impervious to heat and cold
- Super hearing
- Ability to learn an unknown alien language by listening to it for less than one hour
- Irresistable to women
All by themselves, Denning and Liston capture their alien overlords and instruct them to restore Firma's rotation. They do. The resulting cataclysm boils oceans and spews volcanic material into the atmosphere--spinning a planet puts considerable stress on the fragile crust. It will be decades, maybe centuries, before Firma is remotely hospitable again, but Denning and Liston count this as a decisive victory. I wonder why they didn't heed the aliens' advice and allow the re-spinning to be done over the course of decades rather than six months.