OMIM
In 2024 the planet Omega sent a message to Earth. In 3024 a rebel group assembles the resources needed to leave the solar system and visit our alien neighbors.
Adam McShane, tasked with stopping their spaceship, is instead an unwilling passenger on the long journey, arriving with the beautiful Lilith. She says they come in peace, but when they arrive they find anything but.
The peaceful Omegans live in constant fear of Omim and their leader, The One. Is Adam their prophesied savior?
The story
Adam McShane has dedicated his life to the service of his planet. Now, six months away from retirement, he just wants to finish out in peace. The morning after a night of lonely debauchery, he gets called in on his birthday for a major mission. A group of Saganites are prepared to launch a ship and make first contact. For a thousand years Earth has been divided on whether or not to respond to the message it had received. So far, the powers that be have managed to prevent that despite constant conflict.
This isn’t the first time Adam has fought Saganites, but this time things don’t go according to plan and he finds himself trapped aboard their ship. The only other passenger is Lilith, an idealistic young woman from one of Mars’s wealthiest families. When they crash land on Omega she expects to bring peace, science, and reason. Adam, with some Catholic-Christian faith, though in tatters, has a different view of human nature.
Clearly neither character is a Mary Sue, with Adam (even in first person) coming across is somewhat pathetic. Author Michael McGruther knows his craft, and uses that to make Adam’s arc that much more satisfying. Lilith’s arc is a little more ambiguous, even though all of her ideology is stripped away.
The Omegans, who learned Earth languages from the 1977 Voyager Golden Records, welcome Adam and Lilith with open arms. In fact, they believe that Adam will deliver them from the terror of the Omim. Since the arrival their dark oppressors, the Omegans have lived in hiding as the Omim abduct them use their bodies and souls for dark purposes. Forced to confront this overwhelming evil in order to rescue Lilith and prevent the Omim from finding their way to Earth, Adam must become become the hero he never wanted to be.
One wishes that McGruther had a better editor, as the story deserves more polish. The descriptions are breathtaking and the plot has brilliant twists. If the book has a fatal flaw it’s in the presentation, certainly not in the raw material.
The characters
Adam is broken man. Whatever faith he once had was shattered with the murder of his fiancé. So he poured himself into military service, meaningless sex, and alcohol. With just six months left in his contract, he hopes to finish out in peace. A reluctant hero, he doesn’t want to save anyone, even himself and certainly not an entire planet (or two). It’s only when Lilith is taken captive by The One that he digs deep, both into his own abilities and a nearly forgotten faith.
On the other side is Lilith. Young and beautiful, she’s an idealist, feminist, scientist. She left her life on Mars to bring enlightenment to Omega and become the mother of the first humans on the distant planet. While she soon finds herself used for procreation, it’s not in the way she anticipated, and she has no means to comprehend pure evil.
The leader of the Omim calls himself The One. A soul-consuming wraith, he offers Lilith eternal life. But in exchange for what? With the ability to warp perception his manipulation abilities are unfathomable. Yet unable to create, he must use other methods to spread his evil across the galaxies.
The world
Omega is a sort of paradise, filled with creatures and characters that will look familiar to any fan of 80’s fantasy films. But whether we’re in our home galaxy, on a spaceship, or a distant planet, McGruther excels at cinematic description. If he leans on tropes, it’s to make the story more easily play out in our minds.
The politics
While the story is seeded with cultural and political allusions, they never take center stage. Adam holds to traditional values, while Lilith is extremely progressive, but this isn’t really that sort of story on the surface.
Content warning
To a certain degree, the whole story is about sex and reproduction. Both Adam and Lilith are stripped naked on their respective journeys, and Adam has a vision of Lilith being raped (it’s just an illusion). There’s the sort of violence that you’d expect in any sort of sword and planet story, but nothing too graphic.
Who is it for?
OMIM is for fans of old-school science fiction and the more out there episodes of The Twilight Zone, but written in the spirit of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom trilogy. It’s also for anyone who likes their stories filled with symbolism to unpack. I had to dig deep to figure out what “Omim” really means, but once I did it made perfect sense.
Why read it?
It’s a story that both entertains and makes us uneasy. It draws us deep into its world, and makes more aware of our own, challenging us to stand firm in our convictions.