Guest Post-Joshua Yancy

Our earth has known human life for over 3 million years. As generations of beings have passed, is there some deeper existence that connects us all? What happens when all life on earth ends? Will it start anew?  These are some of the philosophical questions that inspired Turkish author, Ismet Yesil to write a write a new kind of book, The Guardian & The Loop. Half of it outlines his theories that help answer questions like these; the other half uses these theories to explore a science fiction story that begins in our past and ends in the far away future.

I have different kinds of books sent to me all the time.  But when The Guardian and the Loop by Ismet Yesil arrived I knew I was going to need some help.  Thankfully Joshua (who works with Dear Hubby) was up to a challenge.  Yes, I handed over the book with a plead for a review.  Why?  Heck, I could not even understand the book cover.  Joshua and Dear Hubby have the ability to wrap their brains around more than I can.  Thus to the professional this is handed over.  Joshua, take it away.

Review of The Guardian and the Loop by Ismet Yesil

This book opens with glimpses into infinitesimal snatches of time. Bite sized passages allowing a half a dozen pages of ink on paper to flesh out a prehistoric persons life and culture. Captured time make us see our ancestors in sudden bites of past lives and future progeny. Births are marked, struggles with the near past, now present and the omnipresent aspects of a changing climate are highlighted without being overdressed. Then death, always death followed by the traces that the person left behind for the shovels of written history. Except for Jesus as he does he makes an appearance.

After the first third of the book the soil and stone we walk across as members of humanity stretches to the ends of writing and apparently we began to pay much more attention to the stars. The steady torches that as a populace we have struggled to understand and so we made up a variety of tales. Except for the protagonists who receive some artifacts and receive one way communications from space rocks. 

Half way through the book the future is here. Don't get too excited for a happy go lucky future because instead you get a future of slow decline interspersed with space travel as the worlds left behind begin to fail. Do not forget that by this point you are 150 or so pages in and have followed lives from the handful of characters living from the beginning of human history to the end of it. Somehow it all comes together in the end, the actual story line becomes a Loop as suggested in the title. 
 
I was surprised to find that this was the end of the novel part of the book. "A revolutionary approach to the structure of the novel" as claimed by the back cover.  Begrudgingly I must agree that a revolution is a print in a most unpleasant manner. This upsetting change from fiction to workbook breaks the illusion that was fairly easy to hold considering the utter lack of character development beyond mentioning that the character was also a space rock priest.

Do you want mostly blank pages to fill out your answers below? You got it. Want vague questions with existential causes and real life effects? That's there too. Now do you have your answers, for the sake of your time let us hope not. Your answer would have been wrong. You didn't seriously consider purely imaginary leaps in technology. The author backs his sources 
with some hokum labeled "Scientific Considerations". G9/Page 179 to be 
particular. 51 words refuting Einstein. That is actually all I can politely say.

This is at best a work of pleasant and engrossing fiction. After finding myself going back and forth to the book itself I cant decide whether this book could be filed as anthropology, science fiction, astronomy or a series of other parts of the Dewey decimal system. 

So I read it again, at two hundred pages why not?