Product Description

Jurassic Park meets Lost in this electrifying new adventure thriller. When the cast and crew of reality TV show 'SeaLife' land on picturesque, unexplored Henders Island it's a ratings bonanza. But they're blissfully unaware that the decisions they make there will shape the fate of mankind ! if they can only survive. For they quickly discover that the island is seething with danger. Having evolved in total isolation from the rest of the planet for millennia, Henders is home to host of vicious and exotic predators, terrifying creatures who live in a lightning fast blur of kill or be killed. A team of crack scientists is sent in to assess the situation and they are astounded by what they find. It soon becomes clear that if even the smallest bug ever made it off Henders island, life on earth as we know it would change very quickly indeed. The President is faced with the toughest decision of his career: take the risk of letting one of these creatures escape so that further research can be done, or nuke the island to protect the rest of planet Earth? Just when it seems the stakes couldn't get any higher, the scientists make a surprise discovery that changes everything!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31965 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Review
'Fahy's imaginative debut puts a fresh spin on the survival-of-prehistoric-beasts theme popularized by Jurassic Park.' Publisher's Weekly 'Good, fast fun' Bookseller

From the Author
What inspired you to start writing Fragment?
Having been fascinated with biology since I was a child (at the age of 9 I used to dig for fossils in the Hollywood Hills by myself after school, and I attended a neurobiology course at Cal-Tech when I was 11 years old), I have been a life-long student of naturalism, weaned by far-off heroes like David Attenborough, Louis Leakey, and Charles Darwin. That was my general inspiration in all things evolutionary. What specifically inspired the premise of Fragment were some of the writings of Stephen Jay Gould and the discovery of the Movile Cave in Romania, where 33 previously unknown species had evolved in total darkness after being sealed off for five million years. After tinkering with ideas based on these and other fascinating facts, the whole story suddenly fell into place in a flash of inspiration – and I dropped everything else I was working on and never looked back until it was done.

The scientific detail is very impressive, how long did it take you to research the background to the novel?
In a sense, all of my life. I have always pondered what forces brought about the emergence of our planet’s incredibly diverse life forms. It’s a constant audio track in my head. Once I began work on the novel proper, however, it took about three years of intense research to flesh out the ecosystem of Henders Island.
The creatures from the island are included in sketch form in the book. Did you always know how you wanted them to look?
Yes, I knew precisely how I wanted them to look, what kind of locomotion I wanted them to have, etc., then worked with scientists and artists to bring that to life, and during that process they evolved as necessary adaptations emerged. It was a very Darwinian process! What surprised me most was that no matter how outlandish and alien the species I thought I was creating, I nearly always found that nature had beaten me to it and that there was some living allegory that used precisely the same process or mechanism – sometimes in an even more outlandish form! Ironically, trying to outdo nature with all the freedom of my imagination gave me a renewed respect for nature’s staggeringly boundless invention.

Do you have any one scene in Fragment that you most enjoyed writing?
Without giving too much away, I had a blast writing the rover scene. One of the things I love to do is put characters into the most terrifying position I can imagine, with no clue how to get them out of it, strand them there and sit back to watch what happens. Did you find that the characters behaved as you had planned, or did they ever surprise you? They surprised me, often, and certainly did what they wanted to in most respects. Sounds odd perhaps, but I don’t create characters so much as identify them, put them in the situation, and then report on what they do. I know what kind of characters, in terms of skills and personality, I will need to have present to accomplish certain things, and outside of that, I let them go. Curiously, they won’t let themselves die sometimes, even if that’s what I had planned, and if and when they do die, it’s very hard for me to report the news of their deaths.

About the Author
Warren Fahy was born in Hollywood. He's been a bookseller a statistical analyst, and the managing editor of a video database, where he wrote hundreds of movie reviews for a column that was nationally syndicated in the US. Until recently, he was the lead writer for WowWee, generating creative content for their line of advanced robotic toys. He lives quietly in San Diego with his pug Caesar and is currently looking for a wife.

Customer Reviews

The lost Jurassic Park
With a strapline which essentially covers the whole ethos of this book, 'A Jurassic Park for the Lost generation' you certainly know what to expect. And you get it - in hordes of man-eaters, swarms of ditto and, frankly, with more than half an eye on the blockbuster film, a gripping yet not unexpected grand finale and a meeting of minds/bodies for our two hero characters.

It is formulaic, hence my four stars but it is very well written and the author seems to well understand how to create a scientific explanation for his creatures. Whether it works so well when villains (a villain, really) and terrorist threats loom into the picture it a moot point.

But if you like gore and action and gore and beasts and gore and...well, you catch the mood of most of the book, this one should be right up your jungle trail.

Jurassic Park for the Primeval Generation...
`Fragment' by Warren Fahy has been dubbed "Jurassic Park for the Lost Generation" - I'm not quite sure what that's supposed to mean but I can see various similarities between the three and it also made me really look forward to reading this book.

It begins when a reality TV show called SeaLife responds to a distress call on an previously un-explored island thousands of miles away from anywhere. The cast and crew of the show get there and all hell breaks loose as life on the island has evolved completely separately from the rest of the world and are a lot more advanced - not to mention vicious - than anything else on Earth. It is then up to the President of the United States with the help of some of the best scientists to decide the fate of Henders Island and its occupants.

This is a pretty trashy read - it was definitely written with Hollywood in mind (I'll be very surprised if there isn't a film version soon) and therefore is very easy to follow with lots of action and is incredibly fast paced. When I first started this I literally couldn't put it down, I was hooked. The idea of being on an island that no one has explored before with creatures beyond our imagination is great as the possibilities are endless. Fahy obviously spent a lot of time thinking up the creatures as some of the descriptions are so detailed and in depth that you'd think that it was a real animal he was talking about.

Despite being a bit of a dumbed-down Jurassic Park with characters that had possibly the most stupid names I can remember (Zero, Peach and Angel - what was he thinking!?) up until about page 350 I would have easily given this book a 5 star review - it was fantastic. Without spoiling it for anyone who's yet to read it, it goes completely off track to the point where it is just ridiculous after this and completely ruins what otherwise would have been an excellent debut novel. I was so disappointed that it turned out the way it did but if there ever was a missed opportunity at being amazing, this is it.

Overall this started off as a brilliant adventure novel that I was thoroughly enjoying and ended up being completely awful because of the stupid ending. Why Fahy decided to go this way is beyond me as he was onto a winner so all I can say really is if you're reading this and enjoying it, you are likely to be heavily disappointed by the end.

A travesty
Well the first thing I would take issue with is the tag-line "Jurassic Park meets Lost". I am a huge fan of both Lost and the Jurassic Park book and whilst I can see the slight comparison with the book I don't really get the Lost link. Yes it is on an island with weird creatures, but isn't that just Jurassic Park?

As for the comparisons to Jurassic Park, it is frankly a travesty for anyone to see this in the same class as Crichton. Yes Crichton mixes action with science and all that but there is a major difference, Crichton is actually a good writer.

This had a decent premise which in the hands of someone who could actually write would have made an awesome story able to rival the best out there, however, from the moment I started reading I was horrified at the terrible writing.

The imagery is so appalling I am amazed that the editors did not ensure sections were re-written. There were times when the imagery and comparisons made no sense and some were so random it seemed the author just guessed at what a simile was. The descriptive passages are also poor with creatures etc lacking any real detail. Whilst I realise that the whole point was to give the flora/fauna an alien appearance, you surely have to draw the line somewhere and after finishing the novel I still wasn't sure what half the animals even looked like. It was only at the end of the book that I discovered the inclusion of a couple of pictures of a couple of the animals. Unfortunately these were completely different from the images the author had managed to describe. I have read my fair share of fantasy and science fiction novels, some good, some bad, and most leave me with an understanding of what the characters, monsters etc look like but this author seems to think mundane things such as this irrelevant to his story.

As for characterisation, there simply isn't any, the main characters (and I use that phrase very loosely) were one-dimensional at best and the other "characters" were even worse. I was constantly waiting to find some sort of connection with any of the characters but even at the end I really didn't care what happened to any of them. As for the `bad-guy', it was blatantly obvious what he was going to do from the off-set which ruined any chance of building suspense and making the story even remotely interesting. Normally when I read I find some characters annoying, some funny etc but for the first time since I started reading I can honestly say that I really have no opinion about any of the characters from this novel simply because I don't even remember most of them.

The opening of the book reads like a child had written it and the ending is truly atrocious. Throughout the book you are treated to cliché after cliché almost as if the author had a "dummies guide to writing a novel" next to him and even then he appears to have skipped a few fundamental chapters. It was also lost in its own theorising for significant sections which both distracted from the main story of the novel and reduced a poor read into a boring one. I am all for scientific and philosophical inclusion in books, but it surely can't be a good sign when at the end of the book you actually end up agreeing with the "bad-guy".

From a great premise with huge potential this book lacks any depth with desperately poor description and imagery. There is little to no characterisation and I was not only left with no empathy for any of the characters but often hoping for them to befall some grizzly death just to end the book quicker. I really hope the publishers manage to get this sorted but I can honestly say that if this is the level of writing they are happy with then it is frankly a shocking indictment of their standards. I fail to understand how anyone could have actually enjoyed this and I can honestly say that if it was a choice of reading this book again or being eaten alive by Crichton's dinosaurs, the latter would definitely be my choice as it would undoubtedly be less painful!