This truly epic science-fiction novel, Them That Are Called, took its author more than sixteen years to complete this hefty narrative. In this dystopia work of 526 pages, Earthlings have struck a bargain long ago with ruthless invaders, who are followers of the supreme deity Omniabba. The mortals are not to be provoked into defiance or protest, and not into base thinking and cowardice.
The story features Meseth, the scientist, along with a cast of characters who are more numerous than film director Cecil B. DeMille’s cattle call for the classic film The Ten Commandments. The enemy of the mortals are killers, ageless, with an agenda to destroy anything and anybody in the cosmos. In this book, which fits the category of a dystopia text, the fictional universe is teetering between survival and destruction.
The reader is assisted by fairly detailed family and class trees, the House Thunvega, with such names as Adamah, Yasiel, Kya, Mansa, Enoch, Oboli, and Uriah. In terms of leadership, there are the heralds of the Melek and Nazerite ranks, from the administration to the military. Also, drama bubbles up in the confines of Uhuru’s Northwest Wing and the palace, whereas plots and schemes exist in the Melek family wing.
Parker has a gentle touch when the situation warrants it, for example, Abba speaking to his son: “The lesson to remember, son, as you go is that you can only be you. You are the seed today. Tomorrow, you will be the tree.”
The genres of science fiction and fantasy are currently very popular. However, the dystopian formula defies category, especially with the quality of the author’s writing and imagination. In 1926, publisher Hugo Gernsback’s definition of “scientifiction” takes the literary legacy of the titans Jules Verne and H.G. Wells seriously, blending scientific information with prophetic vision. This offering, Parker’s Them That Are Called, attempts valiantly to expand on Gernsback’s terms, but with limiting results.
In this type of fantasy, the author sells a sense of freshness and innovation, combining all the common elements of the genre including technological, military, and alien ingredients. He understands what the visionary author Ursula Le Guin notes: “All fiction is metaphor… Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.”
Parker’s narrative strength is one of majestic world-building, much like the prime skill of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. When the reader is hurled over 230 years later, the author hits his stride: “Egnatia. A planet ripe with green wooded mountains and littered with grassy plains. Its islands are so many that its blue oceans seem rather to be dispersed as an infinite number of lakes, ponds, rivers. The rain falls often here, in bright or clouded skies.”
Another virtue is the author’s array of characters, some likable and others disgusting, but he brings them to life on the page with context and detail. He chooses several tragedies and triumphs for them before closing in for the kill. The reader will have fun keeping a tally of who the characters are, who they have been, and who they are becoming.
Like life, there are colonized cultures, social strife, and evolved leadership and political miscues. If there is a scorecard of the proceedings, the good guys don’t always win and the bad guys don’t always lose. Sure, no book of this type lacks heroes and villains.
Overall, Parker’s Them That Are Called allows the reader to suspend disbelief while taking a direct approach to give them something magical and fantastic. While the general view is a sense of dread and sadness felt by humans living in this universe on the edge of extinction, he encourages a notion that the future is not always grim and foreboding. A happy ending is always around the corner, according to this author.
