Prior to reading this, I was in a reading slump and this book helped me get over it. What it has going for it is that it is a page-turner with an interesting premise. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world with an atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of [b:Wool Omnibus|13453029|Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1)|Hugh Howey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349614200l/13453029._SY75_.jpg|18979356].
Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as masterful. It lacked depth and the writing was subpar. I found this novel to be very formulaic, with generic characters and a twist in the end that was so forced and out of place it made me laugh.
2.5 ( )

I do love Mr Riddle's books but this was too epic for a short book. ( )

AG Riddle writes stories that include world-changing events and suspenseful travel. My first introduction to Riddle’s writing was with his Atlanta Gene series. Just like The Extinction Trials, there was travel, suspense, and budding world change.

In The Extinction Trials, two main characters quickly emerge, a neurological scientist and a fireman. Both did their career jobs nobly intending to save lives. But competing world factions, bent on wiping out existing humanity and restarting a new population, ended their prospects. One political faction used a memory steeling pandemic to accomplish that goal while the other used technology to create killer robots out of all the service robots. Fortunately, a third faction cryogenically preserved as many non-aligned citizens as possible to facilitate the survival of the human species.

The factional wars continued, but The Extinction Trials’ story is primarily about the two main characters, put into cryogenic sleep, who wake up in a dystopian future and are left with vague clues leading to the third faction’s sanctuary. The two end up battling other survivors on the way and mistakenly end up in the pandemic-spreading faction’s control. That faction attempts to chemically alter their minds to make them more compliant to its cause. But they escape before the changes manifest and manage to get to the sanctuary.

At the sanctuary, two advanced androids meet them and assure the couple that they can remove the changes to their brains and preserve them along with the rest of humanity. The couple emerges thousands of years after the rest of the awakened population and find themselves on a new virgin planet. During the time of their extended cryogenic sleep, humanity had built new civilizations on earth and was at a technical level similar to the 1960s. The robots provided the two main characters with a large endowment in the form of diamonds, stones that were plentiful in their former world but are rare on earth and very valuable. Using that endowment, the couple invests in promising world-changing technology companies. At the end of the book, they are going on to prepare the population for settling other planets so that the human race no longer faces extermination at the hands of its political factions.

The book’s story and its pace kept me engaged. I spent many a late hour reading when I should have been resting in preparation for the following day’s obligations. As a result of AG Riddle formulary writing, I don’t think that I would have enjoyed The Extinction Trials if I had read immediately following the Atlantis Gene. Fortunately, this is a new book that came out long after I read that series so I didn’t need to. ( )

5 stars, The world as they knew it has ended, now what?

THE EXTINCTION TRIALS by A.G. Riddle

A small group of people wakes up in a fallout shelter and as they are learning about what is going on, one of the people waking up murders the man who was telling them about the state of the world at this time. They find that they have to work together to get any further with their escape.

Highly recommend a great dystopian science fiction novel.

Many thanks to #netgalley #legionbooks for the complimentary copy of #theextinctiontrials I was under no obligation to post a review. ( )