Changelings: Insurgence

By Liam Corley

Description:

When Commander Tauran's young son, Lausus, is diagnosed as one of the despised changeling mutants, Tauran believes the government assurances that his boy will be treated well. His less trusting wife, Beatra, however, flees with Lausus to a changeling planet.

After years of leading troops into battles against the mutants, while tirelessly searching for signs of Beatra and Lausus, Tauran seizes on an offer from a trusted, yet rogue, scientist with a time travel device that will enable Tauran to harvest fresh DNA from humans before Earth's nuclear wars.

Teamed with three others-a scientist, a scholar, and a war criminal with nothing to prove-Tauran maxes out the time travel device, arriving to Earth's first century where he encounters a healer from an abandoned religious sect. Faced with more of a mystery than ever, Tauran determines to learn the healer's secrets or risk kidnapping him for his DNA to save Lausus, purge the mutation, and end the war between humans and their mutant offspring.



But Tauran and his team have to move fast-before mutants from their own era overrun the team's time travel site on Terra, and before a government conspiracy to prolong the war destroys what's left of humanity's home world with a final nuclear blast.

Book Takeaway:

I wrote this book with an eye towards making the gospel understandable to the hundreds of irreligious college students and college educated people I deal with every day.

Why the author wrote this book:

I think people will be intrigued by the premise of technologically savvy future humans being driven by circumstances to travel back in time and discover what it means to be really human. The presenting problem of the book—genetic mutation—motivates the characters to seek a physical solution. But their journey into the past makes them confront how the physical problem is a symptom of relational problems at the individual and societal levels, problems which technology can’t solve.

The story integrates sci fi and theology at the level of plot design, not overt signaling, and blends the subgenres of genetic fiction, military fiction, and time travel fiction. While some people think it might be cool to kidnap Jesus as a sort of physical miracle juke-box, CHANGELINGS: INSURRECTION depicts how grief and guilt for personal and societal sins can lead irreligious people to seek redemption in itself, apart from an awareness of the supernatural springs of love that make redemption abound. Reconciliation is the true miracle: “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?” My characters aren’t impressed by making the paralytic walk, but relational healing—that’s a miracle.

I write in response to the very popular Gene Roddenberry universe which imagines a future where religion has withered away from uselessness. I doubt that will ever occur, given how eternity has been put in our hearts. However, I take seriously the ways human society has adapted to convey knowledge about God and important facets of human identity in interpersonal spaces. If practicing religious communities, physical spaces created to elicit focused religious awe, art, architecture, music, the literary and theological archive of human aspiration and longing were all wiped out, humans would find themselves missing much more than just the physical objects. They’d be missing part of themselves, a part that was always meant to be held in a container larger and more durable than the individual psyche.

Consequently, my characters are like patriarchal figures—they have numinous experiences of the gospel, not socially mediated ones. What I hope to accomplish in the story is to engage readers deeply in the longings of my characters and show in an organic manner how secular people can journey back toward a God they aren’t seeking and don’t know exists.