Split Apart for New Perspectives

A review of Brent Nichols’ “Inquisitor” in Lazarus Risen (Bundoran Press, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

In “Inquisitor”, Brent Nichols creates a future in which people can send copies of themselves to new planets, allowing one copy to begin life on a new planet while the original lives out their life on the first. Each copy lives their life out at a different rate, allowing each to have different perspectives and each to gain wisdom from their experiences.

An Inquisitor for a fascist empire called The Regime that used political and religious control on the population, has spent his life chasing after a rebel leader, chasing him from planet to planet with a focused obsession. Yet, in his travels, he has discovered that the Regime he is fighting for had been overthrown a decade ago while he was still pursuing his quarry.

The Inquisitor has to rely on the wisdom of his other selves, who have lived out longer parts of their lives on other planets and discovered more about the horrors undertaken by the Regime and more about the live of his quarry in order to gain experience of the world to see it in a new light and question his single-minded obsession.

Brent Nichols gives readers a critique of moral absolutism and obsession and an awareness that perspective is shaped by our own time period and the things that we believe are truths may not survive the passage of time.

To discover more about Lazarus Risen, visit Bundoran Press’ website at http://www.bundoranpress.com/product/1/Lazarus-Risen

To find out more about Brent Nichols, visit his website at http://www.steampunch.com/about.html