The Heretic by Lucas Bale is a lead-in novel to his Beyond the Wall series. Surprisingly, it is also Bale’s debut novel.
The story takes place in a distant future, a time when Earth: a planet once teeming with billions of souls is a vague legend at best. The remnants of humanity are now scattered across the galaxy and ruled by a body called the Magistratus: an evil empire that rules through force and subjugation.
The Heretic is set on a planet called Herse, a galactic equivalent of an impoverished third world nation, far from the powerful elite of The Core. Local governance is corrupt, of course, and cruel. The main characters are a boy: one of a handful of survivors from a village that had been “cleansed”, a man known as The Preacher: the reason for the cleansing who teaches heretical precepts about freedom and individuality, and a spaceship captain named Shepherd. The Preacher wasn’t always a preacher and gives hints of a dark background. Shepherd pilots an old, worn freighter as a freelance contractor and seems a combination of Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds. Not all of the jobs he takes are entirely honest. Shepherd is drawn into the lives of the villagers as they attempt to flee Herse and in so doing, learns some astonishing things about his ship.
There are shades to the story borrowing from many classic sci-fi works but the one I found most clearly was a pattern from Josh Whedon’s Firefly. Bale acknowledges that influence in his remarks after the end of the novel. If one must borrow, you might as well borrow from the best.The result is a smart, well written novel that clips right along and keeps the reader fascinated. The characters are strong, the world-building is solid, yet never expository, and the editing (often a sore point with indie publications) is excellent.
If this is Bales debut novel, I can only look forward to the rest of the series with much anticipation. This fella has talent!
The Heretic: Beyond the Wall book 1 is available
for Kindle
and in paperback.
