A review of The Flight of the Silvers

The seeds of a hundred stories are planted in The Flight of the Silvers, the first in what's likely to be large multivolume series from Daniel Price. Three godlike figures appear in modern-day Earth and put silver bracelets on a small group of people without explanation. Just a short time later, the sky literally falls down, the entire world is destroyed and the "Silvers" are transported to an alternate reality.

Stuck in a new San Diego with no idea why, uptight nurse Amanda and her flaky sister Hannah, cheerful comic book artist Zach, burnt-out child prodigy Theo, sweet teen Mia and spookily precocious David are quickly scooped up by some shady scientific types and given the first hint of why they alone survived the annihilation of their world. Each of them has the innate ability to control what this world has learned to master with machinery - temporis and the manipulation of time.

The Flight of the Silvers is a masterful mixture of a huge number of concepts but at its core it's probably most like TV show Heroes (well, the first season anyway). A team of super-powered humans are brought together by circumstances beyond their control, stuck in an unfamiliar environment and subjected to the attempted manipulations of a bunch of competing forces, all with their own vested interests that may or may not be willing to bother about what's good for the Silvers. As in Heroes, the best moments come from the interactions between our band of supers, thrown together and forced to trust and get to know each other in very little time, and their encounters with the villainous rogue element of their little group (or their Sylar, to stick to the metaphor).

On top of all that, they need to try to figure out every shady power struggle in their new reality, deal with the fact that they now have superpowers and are never going to be able to go home and try to find out just who their mysterious omniscient saviours are and what they have to do with everything. It's quite a tangle of plot threads for Price to throw up, but by the end of this novel, you can already see the outline of how they might come together and rather than getting lost in a sea of unresolved stories, you feel that Price could string the lot into a very exciting cohesive whole. 

Along with a breakneck plot aching with potential, Flight of the Silvers also introduces engaging, living characters that defy any attempts to pigeonhole them. Although all of them have some elements of cliche (Hannah is an actress? And she's flaky?! You don't say!) and each have their niche in the group to begin with, they refuse to stay stuck in their boxes, constantly revealing new layers of personality. You'll be hooked from the first page and providing Price can live up to the promise of this first volume, you'll be signed up for as many of them as he wants to churn out.