Reminiscent of The Martian and World War Z, Sleeping Giants is a luminous conspiracy yarn that shoots for (and lands among) the stars.Pierce Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising As high-concept as it is, Sleeping Giants is a thriller through and through. . . . Not only is Sleeping Giants one of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory, its a smart demonstration of how science fiction can honor its traditions and reverse-engineer them at the same time.NPR [Sylvain] Neuvelweaves a complex tapestry with ancient machinery buried in the Earth, shadow governments, and geopolitical conflicts. Butthe most surprising thing about the book may just be how compelling the central characters are in the midst of these larger-than-life concepts. . . . I cant stop thinking about it.Chicago of BooksFirst-time novelist Sylvain Neuvel does a bold, splashy cannonball off the high dive with Sleeping Giants. It bursts at the seams with big ideas and the questions they spawnHow much human life is worth sacrificing in the pursuit of scientific progress? Can humanity be trusted with weapons of ultimate destruction? And the biggest: Are we alone? But all that really matters is that this book is a sheer blast from start to finish. I havent had this much fun reading in ages.Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter and the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogyA remarkable debut . . . Reminiscent of Max Brookss World War Z, the storys format effectively builds suspense.Library Journal (debut of the month) This stellar debut novel . . . masterfully blends together elements of sci-fi, political thriller and apocalyptic fiction. . . . A page-turner of the highest order.Kirkus s (starred review)[A] fascinating first novel . . . This intriguing tale is entirely worthy of an adult audience.Publishers WeeklyAbout the AuthorSylvain Neuvel is a linguist and translator based in Montreal. He is at work on an R2-D2 replica and his next novel.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.PART ONEBody PartsFile No. 003Interview with Dr. Rose Franklin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Enrico Fermi InstituteLocation: University of Chicago, Chicago, ILHow big was the hand?6.9 meters, about twenty-three feet; though it seemed much larger for an eleven-year-old.What did you do after the incident?Nothing. We didnt talk about it much after that. I went to school every day like any kid my age. No one in my family had ever been to college, so they insisted I keep going to school. I majored in physics.I know what youre going to say. I wish I could tell you I went into science because of the hand, but I was always good at it. My parents figured out I had a knack for it early on. I must have been four years old when I got my first science kit for Christmas. One of those electronics kits. You could make a telegraph, or things like that, by squeezing wires into little metal springs. I dont think I would have done anything different had I listened to my father and stayed home that day.Anyway, I graduated from college and I kept doing the only thing I knew how to do. I went to school. You should have seen my dad when we learned I was accepted at the University of Chicago. Ive never seen anyone so proud in my life. He wouldnt have been any happier had he won a million dollars. They hired me at the U of C after I finished my Ph.D.When did you find the hand again?I didnt. I wasnt looking for it. It took seventeen years, but I guess you could say it found me.What happened?To the hand? The military took over the site when it was discovered.When was that?When I fell in. It took about eight hours before the military stepped in. Colonel HudsonI think that was his namewas put in charge of the project. He was from the area so he knew pretty much everyone. I dont remember ever meeting him, but those who did had only good things to say about the man.I read what little was left of his notesmost of it was redacted by the military. In the three years he spent in charge, his main focus had always been figuring out what those carvings meant. The hand itself, which is mostly referred to as the artifact, is mentioned in passing only a few times, evidence that whoever built that room must have had a complex enough religious system. I think he had a fairly precise notion of what he wanted this to be.What do you think that was?I have no idea. Hudson was career military. He wasnt a physicist. He wasnt an archaeologist. He had never studied anything resembling anthropology, linguistics, anything that would be remotely useful in this situation. Whatever preconceived notion he had, it must have come from popular culture, watching Indiana Jones or something. Fortunately for him, he had competent people surrounding him. Still, it must have been awkward, being in charge and having no idea whats going on most of the time.Whats fascinating is how much effort they put into disproving their own findings. Their first analysis indicated the room was built about three thousand years ago. That made little sense to them, so they tried carbon-dating organic material found on the hand. The tests showed it to be much older, somewhere between five thousand and six thousand years old.That was unexpected?You could say that. You have to understand that this flies in the face of everything we know about American civilizations. The oldest civilization were aware of was located in the Norte Chico region of Peru, and the hand appeared to be about a thousand years older. Even if it werent, its fairly obvious that no one carried a giant hand from South America all the way to South Dakota, and there were no civilizations as advanced in North America until much, much later.In the end, Hudsons team blamed the carbon dating on contamination from surrounding material. After a few years of sporadic research, the site was determined to be twelve hundred years old and classified as a worship temple for some offshoot of Mississippian civilization.I went through the files a dozen times. There is absolutely nothing, no evidence whatsoever to support that theory, other than the fact that it makes more sense than anything the data would suggest. If I had to guess, I would say that Hudson saw no military interest whatsoever in all this. He probably resented seeing his career slowly wither in an underground research lab and was eager to come up with anything, however preposterous, just to get out of there.Did he?Get out? Yes. It took a little more than three years, but he finally got his wish. He had a stroke while walking his dog and slipped into a coma. He died a few weeks later.What happened to the project after he died?Nothing. Nothing happened. The hand and panels collected dust in a warehouse for fourteen years until the project was demilitarized. Then the University of Chicago took over the research with NSA funding and somehow I was put in charge of studying the hand I fell in when I was a child. I dont really believe in fate, but somehow small world doesnt begin to do this justice.Why would the NSA get involved in an archaeological project?I asked myself the same question. They fund all kinds of research, but this seems to fall outside their usual fields of interest. Maybe they were interested in the language for cryptology; maybe they had an interest in the material the hand is made of. In any case, they gave us a pretty big budget so I didnt ask too many questions. I was given a small team to handle the hard science before we handed everything over to the anthropology department. The project was still classified as top secret and, just like my predecessor, I was moved into an underground lab. I believe youve read my report, so you know the rest.Yes, I have read it. You sent your report after only four months. Some might think it was a little hasty.It was a preliminary report, but yes. I dont think it was premature. OK, maybe a little, but I had made significant discoveries and I didnt think I could go much further with the data that I had, so why wait? There is enough in that underground room to keep us guessing for several lifetimes. I just dont think we have the knowledge to get much more out of this without getting more data.Who is we?Us. Me. You. Mankind. Whatever. There are things in that lab that are just beyond our reach right now.Ok, so tell me about what you do understand. Tell me about the panels.Its all in my report. There are sixteen of them, approximately ten feet by thirty-two feet each, less than an inch thick. All sixteen panels were made around the same period, approximately three thousand years ago. We ... If I may. I take it you do not subscribe to the cross-contamination theory?As far as Im concerned, theres no real reason not to trust the carbon dating. And to be honest, how old these things are is the least of our problems. Did I mention the symbols have been glowing for the last seventeen years, with no apparent power source?Each wall is made of four panels and has a dozen rows of eighteen to twenty symbols carved into it. Rows are divided into sequences of six or seven symbols. We counted fifteen distinct symbols in total. Most are used several times, some appear only once. Seven of them are curvy, with a dot in the center, seven are made of straight lines, and one is just a dot. They are simple in design but very elegant.Had the previous team been able to interpret any of the markings?Actually, one of the few sections of Hudsons report left intact by the military was the linguistic analysis. They had compared the symbols to every known writing system, past or present, but found no interesting correlation. They assumed each sequence of symbols represented a proposition, like an English sentence, but with no frame of reference, they couldnt even speculate as to their interpretation. Their work was thorough enough and documented at every step. I saw no reason to do the same thing twice and I declined the offer to add a linguist to the team. With nothing to compare this to, there was logically no way to arrive at any sort of meaning.Perhaps I was biasedbecause I stumbled onto itbut I felt drawn to the hand. I couldnt explain it, but every fiber of my being was telling me the hand was the important piece.Quite a contrast from your predecessor. So what can you tell me about it?Well, its absolutely stunning, but I assume youre not that interested in aesthetics. It measures 22.6 feet in length from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. It seems to be solid, made of the same metallic material as the wall panels, but its at least two thousand years older. It is dark gray, with some bronze overtones, and it has subtle iridescent properties.The hand is open, fingers close together, slightly bent, as if holding something very precious, or a handful of sand, trying not to spill it. There are grooves where human skin would normally fold, others that seem purely decorative. All are glowing the same bright turquoise, which brings out the iridescence in the metal. The hand looks strong, but ... sophisticated is the only word that comes to mind. I think its a womans hand.I am more interested in facts at this point. What is this strong but sophisticated hand made of?It proved nearly impossible to cut or otherwise alter by conventional means. It took several attempts to remove even a small sample from one of the wall panels. Mass spectrography showed it to be an alloy of several heavy metals, mostly iridium, with about 10 percent iron and smaller concentrations of osmium, ruthenium, and other metals of the platinum group.It must be worth its weight in gold?Its funny you should mention that. It doesnt weigh as much as it should so Id say its worth a lot more than its weight, in anything.How much does it weigh?Thirty-two metric tons ... I know, its a respectable weight, but its inexplicably light given its composition. Iridium is one of the densest elements, arguably the densest, and even with some iron content, the hand should easily weigh ten times as much.How did you account for that?I didnt. I still cant. I couldnt even speculate as to what type of process could be used to achieve this. In truth, the weight didnt bother me nearly as much as the sheer amount of iridium I was looking at. Iridium is not only one of the densest things you can find, its also one of the rarest.You see, metals of this groupplatinum is one of themlove to bond with iron. Thats what most of the iridium on Earth did millions of years ago when the surface was still molten and, because its so heavy, it sunk to the core, thousands of miles deep. What little is left in the Earths crust is usually mixed with other metals and it takes a complex chemical process to separate them.How rare is it in comparison to other metals?Its rare, very rare. Lets put it this way, if you were to put together all the pure iridium produced on the entire planet in a year, youd probably end up with no more than a couple metric tons. Thats about a large suitcaseful. It would take decades, using todays technology, to scrounge up enough to build all this. Its just too scarce on Earth and there simply arent enough chondrites lying around.You lost me.Sorry. Meteorites; stony ones. Iridium is so rare in Earth rocks that it is often undetectable. Most of the iridium we mine is extracted from fallen meteorites that didnt completely burn up in the atmosphere. To build this roomand it seems safe to assume that this is not the only thing they would have builtyoud need to find it where there are a lot more than on the Earths surface.Journey to the center of the Earth?Jules Verne is one way to go. To get this type of metal in massive quantities, youd either have to extract it thousands of miles deep or be able to mine in space. With all due respect to Mr. Verne, we havent come close to mining deep enough. The deepest mines we have would look like potholes next to what youd need. Space seems much more feasible. There are private companies right now hoping to harvest water and precious minerals in space in the very near future, but all these projects are still in the early planning stages. Nonetheless, if you could harvest meteorites in space, you could get a lot more iridium, a whole lot more.What else can you tell me?That pretty much sums it up. After a few months of looking at this with every piece of equipment known to man, I felt we were getting nowhere. I knew we were asking the wrong questions, but I didnt know the right ones. I submitted a preliminary report and asked for a leave of absence.Refresh my memory. What was the conclusion of that report?We didnt build this.Interesting. What was their reaction?Request granted.That was it?Yes. I think they were hoping I wouldnt come back. I never used the word alien, but thats probably all they took out of my report.That is not what you meant?Not exactly. There might be a much more down-to-earth explanation, one I just didnt think of. As a scientist, all I can say is that humans of today do not have the resources, the knowledge, or the technology to build something like this. Its entirely possible that some ancient civilizations understanding of metallurgy was better than ours, but there wouldnt have been any more iridium around, whether it was five thousand, ten thousand, or twenty thousand years ago. So, to answer your question, no, I dont believe humans built these things. You can draw whatever conclusion you want from that.Im not stupid; I knew I was probably putting an end to my career. I certainly annihilated any credibility I had with the NSA, but what was I going to do? Lie?What did you do after you submitted your report?I went home, to where it all began. I hadnt gone home in nearly four years, not since my father died.Where is home? where can i download free pdf books Sleeping Giants (The Themis Files)
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. MehBy Matt T.The idea behind this book is fantastic. I just feel like it's not being executed very well. There are tons of awesome opportunities for action or scenarios where the author could really build up an amazing description but it all just falls flat and takes a back seat to a silly love story. I really hope that the second book does not continue down the same path.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Purchased after reading a lengthy, feature review in Kirkus ...By Lex TalionisPurchased after reading a lengthy, feature review in Kirkus Reviews, which without doubt raised expectations. The concept was the most interesting element of the novel, along with the gradually revealed history and shadowed players behind the scenes. The interview / interrogatory style of storytelling made the narrative more awkward than I thought necessary; it seemed to empty all emotion and suspense out of the plot. Reminded me of a court reporter reading back a portion of a witness's testimony. However, it did pique my interest enough that I will purchase the next volume of the series, even though this debut novel was not what I had hoped it would be.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Solid BeginningBy Kindle CustomerStill not sure why almost every sci-fi series is a trilogy now, but this is a solid opener. Not always a fan of the interview style of storytelling, but it works well here. The characters are rich, the pace is well. characters leave and return unexpectedly. Good cliffhanger that make you anxious to read the next book. Good opening book but the real proof will be in the conclusion of the series.