Anna Vladis’s COLIBRI plays out over eight days in the life of its imprisoned protagonist, professor Dr. Nina Mirolyubko, who faces the death penalty for her role in the development of teleportation. Mirolyubko hopes her research will spark a utopian era to fend off an impending future where artificial intelligence networks run by a global deep state aim to enslave humans who teleport. The struggle begins when world powers arrest and jail the professor under the pretense that her new technology will kill teleporters en route to their destinations. The core storyline–can imprisoned heroine Mirolyubko’s research save her from the death penalty while at the same time, saving humanity–is both engaging and original. However, the book suffers because the author relies heavily on expositional narrative instead of interplay and action between her characters. Her work also needs more detailed imagery and character description to make this future world and its inhabitants come alive for readers. As a result, the book at times is a cumbersome read.

The plot gets further bogged down in its multitude of settings, which include London, Dubai, Turkey, Greece, Moscow, and an island near Greenland, each home to a confusing array of ancillary characters who try to impact the professor’s fate. Further, the book’s complex sequencing in both time and place, and its multiple, vaguely described characters, fail to fulfill the potential of an imaginative and compelling storyline. The author also skips back and forth unsuccessfully in the narrative’s shifting points of view. Heroine Mirolyubko is told in the first person, but her family, colleagues and adversaries are told in the third, a technique that jars and disrupts the story’s pacing and flow.

COLIBRI is professionally presented and well-formatted but it lacks enough action and conflict to engage readers so they care about the protagonist’s fight to create a humane world and marry the best of humanity and technology. Stylistically, author Vladis is an accomplished and precise writer who draws on creative concepts similar to those in William Gibson’s The Peripheral. She shines when she details her vision of the new world order, where entertainment, education, law and government are interconnected through virtual diplomacy. Her portrayal of a place where humans and tech have become a hybrid mesh of data-chip implants connected to a global network run by artificial intelligence in an evolving metaverse is compelling.

Intriguing and, at times engaging, author Anna Vladis’s futuristic novel COLIBRI ultimately unravels into a broken-down mish-mash about teleportation and the fate of humanity.

~Robin L Harvey for IndieReader