However, Neuvel asks his reader to ponder Big Questions about technology and warfare while keeping the mood light. The premise has the potential to go to some very dark places and make for heavy reading. What I didn’t expect from Sleeping Giants, but found in spades, was humour. This, combined with the anonymous interviewer and the lack of information the characters and reader are given about whom he works for adds a sense of mystery and intrigue. Neuvel gives readers the basic facts on the page, but there’s just as much story to be read in the characters’ pauses and silences. The events of the story are recalled after the fact and distorted by time and bias rather than experienced direct by the reader there are no primary sources. It reads like the modern equivalent of Gothic epistolary. If fact, so does naming your series The Something Files (The Themis Files, The Illuminae Files, The Chequy Files) What’s up with that? But I digress. This fragmentary style seems to be in vogue right now, especially in SF.

I was also drawn to the fact that the entire story is narrated as a series of interviews between an unnamed interrogator and Dr Franklin, her team of specialists and a few high-ranking government officials. It’s always interesting to examine ethical questions around how we as people and nations apply technology. I mean, you give humans access to powerful technology, and it’s pretty even odds as to whether we’ll use it to publish pictures of our breakfast on the Internet or bring about the apocalypse. I don’t read a lot of SF, so Sleeping Giants was an unusual choice for me, but the cover caught my eye (I know, cover snob: guilty as charged) and the premise had me intrigued. However, as the pieces literally start slotting into place, the question shifts from what Dr Franklin and her team have unearthed to how humanity will choose to use it. Especially when similar, uh, artefacts begin to surface across the globe. But Dr Franklin, now one of the world’s leading physicists, is determined to figure it out. Seventeen years later, no one can explain the hole. … There I was, this tiny little thing at the bottom of the hole, lying on my back in the palm of a giant metal hand. The walls were dark and straight with bright, beautiful turquoise light shining out of intricate carvings. The hole I was in was perfectly square, about the size of our house. When she’s eleven, Rose Franklin falls in mysterious hole at the end of her street and discovers something… strange.

Themis files