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Michael McCloskey

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The Trilisk Ruins (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Michael McCloskey (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 5,610 ratings

Book 1 of 20: Parker Interstellar Travels

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Telisa Relachik studied to be a xenoarchaeologist in a future where humans have found alien artifacts but haven't ever encountered live aliens. Of all the aliens whose extinct civilizations are investigated, the Trilisks are the most advanced and the most mysterious.

Telisa refuses to join the government because of her opposition to its hard-handed policies restricting civilian investigation and trade of alien artifacts, despite the fact that her estranged father is a captain in the United Nations Space Force.

When a group of artifact smugglers recruits her, she can't pass up the chance at getting her hands on objects that could advance her life's work. But she soon learns her expectations of excitement and riches come with serious drawbacks as she ends up fighting for her life on a mysterious alien planet.

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From the Author

A 70,000 word science fiction adventure.

About the Author

Michael McCloskey is a software engineer in Silicon Valley who dreams of otherworldly creatures, mysterious alien planets and fantastic adventures.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005Q22AI2
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Squidlord LLC; 1st edition (January 19, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 19, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1200 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 309 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #2,606 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #13 in Space Exploration Science Fiction eBooks
- #18 in Science Fiction Adventure

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4.2 5,610 ratings

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Michael McCloskey

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Michael McCloskey is a software engineer in Silicon Valley who dreams of otherworldly creatures, mysterious alien planets, and fantastic adventures. He is also an indie author with over 300,000 downloads. Visit squidlord.us for more information.

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4.2 out of 5

5,610 global ratings

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Alicia Lewis

Good ole duty reading!!

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2023

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Clean. To the point. Great read. Not too many unnecessary long drawn out explanations. I like it. Characters were well developed. Not many twist, but that was good. Kept the heart palpitations to a minimum.

2 people found this helpful

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Stephen

Tech Trekkie Junkies Would Not Recognize, Action Adventure With Universal Appeal

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2014

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My own Sci-fi experiences outside Star Wars & Star Trek are somewhat limited, but I will be brief. The tech--and the universe in general--in this first book is surprisingly well-crafted and amazingly enough, completely original. It feels as though the author took the last 25 years of tech since ST: TNG and used it to craft a universe that, although free of the humanistic Roddenberry/Berman influences, still retains a flavor of ST: Enterprise. Humanity is taking its first interstellar steps, discovering new worlds. But instead of benignly exploring for scientific and cultural experiences, humanity has found at least 2 sources of alien tech, and tech means power. And without that benign humanism to guide humanity, the struggle for power feels real and imminent. No Picard to lecture us with a moral imperative in a confrontation? Heavens to Betsy! What will we do?

Additionally, this first book makes excellent magic with the true utility of sci-fi, which is to ask serious questions about humanIty. For example, the author rightly anticipates the future risks of robotic development as both tools and weapons, stating, more than once, that the only robots allowed to the general public are benign, housecleaning bots that could break easily so that no human can be overpowered by one if someone else sends it to kill them. This is a question that only now our society is beginning to grapple with in the last 15 years with respect to armed drones and remote reconnaissance.

Also, the book takes a natural development progression I only now understand after owning a tablet. All the humans are well, ...Borg. Cyborg, actually. Using wireless tech for every little thing from flight to intelligent analysis to interpersonal communications, humans have a device in their heads that seamlessly conforms to their thoughts and allows them to check their blood glucose levels, the ships stores, and the time and temperature with a quick glance. It feels natural, however, and very human, not Borg or even Swedish.

Four stars because, although I'm not a critic, I can't readily fault the book or the author for any glaring mistakes. It's a real page-turner, and it doesn't blatently bog down with chapters and chapters of exposition, instead melding it with the action, telling you all you need to know rather succinctly and showing the rest with good, balanced pacing. The story is character-driven, which is the best part of Trek.

By the way, the only reason I deducted a star isn't because of the book itself. I really enjoyed reading this! I just save that star for books that are game-changers, that change my life and my world and have the capacity to do so in others.

Content advisory: Violence, brutal death of more than one person, war-like sequences, language (not gratuitous or lengthy), sexual content but not graphic. A mild PG-13 equivalent.

10 people found this helpful

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Carole Eshenbaugh

light

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2024

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This is a good read and interesting concept. Will read this series because it is just fun. May the series continue to to be even more complex.

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Robert M.

Some imaginitive plot elements, but underdeveloped story and characters

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2012

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This book tells the story of a young "xenoarchaeologist" who gets caught up in a smuggling operation gone wrong. It's a fairly quick-paced, straightforward action-adventure sci-fi story. It has space battles and laser gun fights and explosions and narrow escapes, not to mention aliens and killer robots and strange artifacts and ancient civilizations. Lots of elements from pulp science fiction. It gets going fairly quickly and moves along well. It's not a bad read; just don't expect anything too deep.

Several of the plot elements are quite imaginitive, including the depictions of a couple of different alien races. We get to be "inside the head" of an alien for a few segments, and it's interesting to see the story from the alien's point of view - to "him", of course, the humans are the aliens. There is the sense throughout that aliens are, well, alien, and it's hard to understand their motivations, or their morality, and that their thought processes, and even the physiology of their brains are alien to us.

The characters are not that well developed. I think the alien "Shiny" is the most interesting character. The humans are all kind of dull. This is also one of those books where there's a bunch of stuff that happens, but the story just isn't that tight. There's a long segment where "Shiny" and the dull humans are stuck in an underground alien complex which has lots of weird properties. It's an interesting location, and they spend a good portion of the story trying to find their way out. It raises the question as to what the complex is for, how does it work, why was it built. But once they're out, they're out, and that's it, we're on to the rest of the story, and we basically forget about the alien complex. For something that occupies the first half of the book, it is really of no consequence. Same with some other little plot elements - interesting ideas sprinkled in, but without any real payoff.

The writing is utilitarian and mostly uninspired, and sometimes fails to adquately describe what's going on. There is also some laughably bad dialogue around the sexual tension between Telisa and Magnus. Like semi-illiterate teenage boy level dialogue. One of the better examples is (paraphrasing) "We're going to go copulate. You can look up what that means." Fortunately this is only a minor (and irrelevant) part of the story, and there's nothing graphic, just gratuitous implied sex.

I get the sense the author has larger plans for the characters and the universe he's created, since "Shiny" indicates he may want to be in touch with the dull humans, and meanwhile the dull humans are left cruising around the galaxy as fugitives. It's not high on my priority list, but it might be interesting to find out more, especially from Shiny's point of view.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Laura Nicholson

Great read

Reviewed in Canada on May 11, 2023

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Light and imaginative.

pamela

Interesting and intriguing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2023

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We all still wonder what it would be like to meet a completely different life forms and what that would be like. But I did expect the idea of a creature with three brains.

One person found this helpful

Mandy Walkden-Brown

A good start to the series.

Reviewed in Australia on June 28, 2016

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Fairly slow moving in places, but it does allow one to learn more about what's happening with various Earth factions and the other planets now being explored.

Interesting tech and some strong characters, even if their occupation as alien artefact smugglers is somewhat dubious. My favourite was Shiny, the not so cuddly alien, probably because he was very different to most I've come across in my years of reading science fiction.

Intriguing enough that I have also read the next in the series and book three is on my download list

Richard R.

"Their ignorance held great danger. "

Reviewed in Canada on January 2, 2020

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While the first two chapters were fairly bland, the story picks up and is an entertaining read.

It is a sci-fi, action adventure novel - part of a series. This story is self-contained and resolves the main story before dangling a few threads to encourage picking up the next in the series.

sjhigbee

Alien encounter with plenty of action

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2015

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Telisa Relachik studied to be a xenoarchaeologist in a future where humans have found alien artifacts but haven't ever encountered live aliens. Of all the aliens whose extinct civilizations are investigated, the Trilisks are the most advanced and the most mysterious.
Telisa refuses to join the government because of her opposition to its hard-handed policies restricting civilian investigation and trade of alien artifacts, despite the fact that her estranged father is a captain in the United Nations Space Force. When a group of artifact smugglers recruits her, she can't pass up the chance at getting her hands on objects that could advance her life's work. But she soon learns her expectations of excitement and riches come with serious drawbacks as she ends up fighting for her life on a mysterious alien planet.
Except the book doesn’t start in Telisa’s viewpoint – the Prologue pitchforks us into the head of the intriguing forty-legged alien, Kirizzo. It’s always a big ask to depict an alien with conviction, hence most science fiction authors’ reluctance to undertake such demanding characterisation. So I was impressed at McCloskey’s spirited effort, which he just about pulls off. Unquestionably, Kirizzo is my favourite character.
While there is nothing wrong with Telisa or the other human protagonists, I found Kirizzo’s strangeness engrossing and unusual. I also very much liked the environment where the alien encounters the humans. It provides plenty of tension and I felt even more could have been made of this creepy place – I hope it will turn up again in future episodes of this story.
Meanwhile, Telisa’s story arc, where she joins a smuggling gang because any legal opportunities to study alien technology have been systematically shut down by the government, works well enough. The writing is smooth and there was nothing in her character that jarred. But the vividness accompanying McCloskey’s writing about Kirizzo wasn’t here. The book isn’t a long one and cracks along at a fair pace with plenty of pleasing details that flesh out McCloskey’s world. The ending brings the story arc to a satisfying conclusion, with sufficient dangling plotpoints to encourage a reader to go hunting for the second book in the sequence. Once again, it is Kirizzo’s story where the climax really packs a punch – and is the one which will prompt me to add The Trilisk AI to my already-bulging virtual bookcase.