The Eye of God: A Sigma Force Novel

summary

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Table of contents:
summary: page 3

review: page 5

citations: page 7

themes: page 8

Summary

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 In James Rollins’ new novel The Eye of God, a comet
threatens Earth, and the only way it can be stopped is if a
group of ex-Special Forces operators with advanced
science degrees can find the burial place of Genghis Khan.
At first glance the premise sounds over the top, but in Mr.
Rollins’ skilled hands it works ingeniously.

In the interest of full disclosure, Mr. Rollins gave me a blurb

on my last novel, and we share an interest in caving, but I
would have raved about this book if I didn’t know him from
Adam and I’d never set foot underground.
All the science, all the history, and all the locations are
masterfully intertwined. The characters are multi-
dimensional. And the story is, well, a corker.
The novel opens in Central Hungary in the year 453. The
seventh bride of Attila the Hun is poisoning him on his
wedding night so she can steal relics inadvertently given to
him by Pope Leo.
Then the book jumps forward to present day. A comet like
one set to light up the night sky this coming November is
being intensely studied by scientists who suspect it is giving
off “dark energy,” the mysterious stuff of black holes.
In this one scene, Mr. Rollins manages to deliver an understandable primer on quantum
physics while vaulting the story into high drama and breakneck speed, no mean feat. The
scientists have sent out two satellites to study the comet.
One probes the comet’s tail and promptly disintegrates. The other reels out of orbit and
crashes in Asia, but not before broadcasting frightening images of Boston, New York, and
Washington, D.C. The three cities lie in burnt ruins.
The scientists come to believe that the satellite became briefly “entangled” in the comet’s
dark energy thereby “wrinkling time”, a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein. What
they saw in those images was devastation the comet would cause in four days time.
At the same time in Rome, a researcher at the Vatican receives a package from an old friend
who’s been missing for ten years. It’s an old metal box that contains third century Aramaic
writing on a human skull from the thirteenth century. I won’t give away whose skull it is, but in
translation the ancient writings predict that the end of the world will come four days hence.
At this point Mr. Rollins’ narrative takes on the pace of a galloping horde, with “Sigma Force”
teams dispatched to Asia, one trying to find the crashed satellite, and the other the missing
researcher who sent the box and the skull.
Along the way we travel deep into North Korea, and visit Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea, one of the
most toxic sites in the world. We also witness expert falconry, badass warriors at the peak of
their game, and a dangerous expedition into the steppes, mountains, and lakes of Outer
Mongolia. Did I mention the triad war in Hong Kong and Macau?
It’s obvious that Rollins has been to all these places, and he makes them palpable in the
story without making it a travelogue. It is also obvious that he knows his history, both the
truth and the rumor. The lives and legends of Genghis Kahn, Attila the Hun, and St. Thomas
the doubter are all fodder for his remarkable imagination.

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The science and the engineering are thrown into the mix in a way that’s not only
understandable and plausible but also accurate. Mr. Rollins spent time with quantum
physicists at the Fermi Lab to get it all right.
The people who live in the book are rendered with equal care. Mr. Rollins gives nuance and
story lines to every one of his characters, bad guy, good gal, and everyone in between.
Despite their fantastical jobs, he manages to make them seem like real people, even the guy
who deliberately has sliver-sized “rare earth” magnets surgically implanted into the tips of his
fingers so he can literally “feel the energy.” The fact that these magnets exist and that there
are people who’ve had the implants thereby achieving a true “sixth sense” only makes the
story that much more fun.
Okay, so there was one incident late in the story involving a seal that I didn’t quite buy, but
that’s just quibbling. If you’re a fan of smart, entertaining adventure fiction, this is your
summer beach read writ large.

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/b
ook-review/eye-god-sigma-force-
novel

Review part I

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How does Rollins get away with it? I’ve never figured it out. Most thriller writers are
lambasted for concepts that are wildly implausible, but not Mr. Rollins. A decade ago, he
blew up San Francisco, the western US, and most of Japan in Deep Fathom. If I’m not
mistaken, he blew up the Roman Coliseum, Angor Wat, and a couple National Parks as well.
The Eye of God opens with the whole east coast left as a smoking ruin. Or is it?
Mr. Rollins doesn’t write big-concept books, he writes wild-and-crazy-concept books. Either
you let go of reality and love it or you roll your eyes and toss it aside. I love wild and crazy—
even though I’m a split second away from rolling my eyes and tossing it aside with every turn
of the page. Helicopters that can fly across Asia at supersonic speeds (apparently), escapes
from North Korean maximum security prisons against
overwhelming odds, and elastic travel intervals are no big deal in
any thriller. But mashing up Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and a
time-traveling satellite is something only James Rollins could pull
off. Series books always wrestle with the problem of reader-
fatigue. The nine Sigma books suffer from that unavoidable
issue. Arthur Conan Doyle solved the problem by killing Sherlock
Holmes only to be relentlessly hounded by an upset public. Mr.
Rollins once killed Sigma’s Monk only to bring him back in the
next novel*.n this one, Mr. Rollins finds a creative solution to
reader-fatigue and I think you will find that it works quite well. It
will certainly keep you on your toes when you read the next book.
The writing in this book feels different. It’s as if our already fine
writer is trying to reach a new literary plane. (Literary novels are
those beautifully written but horrifically boring books you read
while waiting for something to happen during a baseball game.) Mr. Rollins’s writing was just
fine ten years ago. This endeavour is also fine but has a few uncharacteristic phrases, such
as: She cursed that such a burden should come to rest in her small palms. How could the
very fate of the world—both now and in the future—fall to her, a woman of only fourteen
summers? Really? Fourteen summers? Odd passages like this crop up from chapter to
chapter – enough to make you laugh but not enough to hurt the story. Hopefully, he’ll just
write his next book and tell his editor to STFU. Overall: another great Sigma story with a few
surprises to keep the fan base on their toes.
Peace, Seeley
* What was it … underwater-air-breathing-humanoids who dragged Monk off the bottom of
the ocean and brought him back to life? Sure. That can happen. At least Mr. Rollins didn’t
take the lifeless corpse back to Planet Vulcan to be casually resurrected in a quasi-spiritual
new age ceremony.
https://seeleyjames.com/2013/08/the
-eye-of-god/

Review part II

I partly agree with this review. I do think this is a book with some implausible explanations to
things, throwing around some high tech nonsense. But the way that this is written makes it

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enjoyable. Some stuff is just hard to believe in this book. What I don’t agree with is
something that has been written in the first paragraph. Within the first line there is stated that
other thrillers don’t get away with crazy concepts. This I think is wrong since almost every
fiction thriller book that I have heard of has gotten away with this. This mainly gets used to
get some progress within the story, otherwise you would be getting away not within 20 pages
but within 60 or even 90. Some books get some profitable effect from this, but not this book
and its writing style. I also do not really mind the so called resurrection of Monk, because it
sure is possible for him to be rescued by a nuclear submarine, looking at their assets. The
last paragraph also states that a woman of fourteen summer, called Seishan, has a love
interest to an elderly man. The person writing this has misunderstood the character. In reality
she is way older, but because of her imprisonment and time in the orphanage se really just
counted the “free years”. It does not mean she is 14 year old.
Overall this is a review made by someone that did read the book, but not fully understood the
way this book was written.

Citations
citation 1:
she wept for the world. (page 7)
even though this is fairly early in the story it is significant. This is the point where you realise
what will play the major role in this story. The end of the world.

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This citation comes from the prologue. The prologue describes a time in the far past where a
an woman betrays a man for the good of the world of her time, but for that to happen she
also needed to be the one to bring doom upon the future world. This I find to be really deep
and I enjoyed thinking about this during my reading of the book.
Citation 2:
“without that last relic,”Vigor said, “we are doomed.”
(page 235)
This is a major part of the book, because the story
begins to move quicker and quicker. This therefore
helps with building the tension.
During this part of the book they get betrayed and
almost buried alive by people that do not realise the
danger that they are in. The first and second relic
were stolen at this point. Then after they stole the 2
relics back they only had 14 hours left. They
realised the only thing to stop the world from ending
was the last relic, an what we learn to be a with dark
energy imbued cross.
Citation 3:
She turned from his screaming and headed back,
leaving him to burn above and freeze below. (page
380)
This citation comes from near the end of the story. It gives a part of relief that at least the
danger of some idiot comes and almost causes the world to end.
During the part where this citation comes from. The group trying to save the world, and yet
again get ambushed. The mother of Saichan comes to the rescue with her gang and can
fend them off. Seichan was the last to see the person that tortured her die. After this it
becomes a race to save the world within a cave made out of ice. It works, but only with 2
seconds to spare.

Themes
Theme 1: Sci-Fi
This theme I chose because it fits very well. A lot of non-existent or still being worked on
technology was used in this book. Some examples are the recently discovered dark energy.
A helicopter that can fly at Mach 3 is also not of this world(yet.) During the story’s escape
from a maximum security prison a stealth plane was used. This plane had some active solar
cloaking on board. This is already a thing but only in the highly advanced military of the
Japanese. Other stealth planes can fly very high and not be detected by radar. But close to
the seabed is not yet available to the Americans.

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Theme 2: History
This theme is traditionally a bit
contradicting to my last one, but it
still fits. During the story you dive
into the history of the Mongol
empire and get a lot of background
information on the characters. For
instance. The complete prologue of
the book is a flashback to the time
where the Mongolian empire was at
its peak. And throughout the story
with help of artefacts and historic
record we learn more and more
from the past to help the situation in
the present. Even the ending of the story is tied to something that happened in the past. The
falling of a meteorite, this was charged with dark energy, this was made into a cross and
served as a magnet for the way bigger meteorites. This was the thing that the protagonists
needed to stop.
Theme 3: Trust
This theme fits well because a lot of the story functions around the trust and friendship
between the characters. The story begins with a bond between a woman and husband. Then
we had an historian and daughter, Ex and ex. Person and country. Even persons only
trusting in exclusively themselves and eventually lovers. Even though some characters had
trust issues they trusted the people that the ones that they trusted trusted.
Everyone in this book put trust in the people trying to save the world when they found out
that was the case. If not for that, the world would have been lost.