Review: There's nothing like a relaxing cruise
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2014
I came across SEDULITY while roaming around post-apocalyptic kindle books and it immediately grabbed me. I have wanted to write this novel for several years now, since we took our first (of 8) cruises to the Caribbean in 1999.  But David Forsyth beat me to it.  Not only that, he has unapologetically  borrowed liberally from one of the best (non-cruise ship) post-apocalyptic stories ever, Niven and Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER, and in a homage and totally open way.The set-up is simple.  A huge metallic meteor comes straight at the earth from the direction of the sun, which prevents its detection until impact in the Pacific.  The Sedulity is a modern 3,000 passenger behemoth on a trans Pacific crossing that happens to be about 100 miles away from the impact site.  Author Forsyth has done his homework, and there is quite a bit of physics and geological and climatalogical information relayed, both as narrated passages and through the voice of passenger Kevin Summers, a California weatherman who as it turns out actually knows something about climatology and is instrumental in advising the Captain how to maximize the possibility of having the ship survive the various thermal blasts, tsunamis and other sequela of the titanic impact.  Descriptions of what happens to much of the rest of the world are rich and ring true, and this is only the beginning.More a novella than a novel at 218 pages, and in truth, more like the first half or third of a longer novel, SEDULITY takes us only through the end of the acute phase of the impact.  The post-apocalypse is yet to come.  There are all sorts of terrific things that the author can do with the Sedulity and the rest of the world and I am looking forward to see how Forsyth handles it.For an indie publication, the writing and editing is definitely far above average. In fact, I rather like Forsyth's style, even though it was the plot that originally drew me in. The prose is clean and clear, and streamlined. There are a few (very few) errors (affect/effect etc.) but they bothered me not at all.For a fresh view on a big impact story, especially if you've ever been on a big cruise ship, I recommend you give SEDULITY a try.J.M. Tepper