Release #: Vol. 85, No. 1
January 01, 2016
Book Review: The Pouakai
By Capt. David Sperry (Hawaiian)
With what purpose would intelligent extraterrestrial beings visit us? Would they come in peace, or to exterminate us so that they could colonize Earth? Many science fiction writers, joined now by Capt. David Sperry (Hawaiian), have tackled this subject.
For his first novel, Sperry, a Honolulu, Hawaii-based B-767 pilot, has crafted The Pouakai, a sci-fi thriller set in Honolulu and the waters, airspace, and tiny islands of the southwestern Pacific.
As the story opens, Capt. Mark “Boonie” Boone is pilot-in-command of a Seven Six flight from Honolulu to Australia, accompanied by a pair of F-22 fighters and a KC-10 tanker, when the airplanes are attacked by a flock of aggressive creatures that resemble flying manta rays, each equipped with a large, forward-pointing spear.
So begins Boonie’s involvement in a desperate academic and military effort to learn more about these and a second type of mysterious life forms that have killed thousands of people, crippled global transportation, created mass starvation, and heightened tensions between Earth’s major military powers.
Another tension is the inherent difference between the way the scientist and the pilot approach the world around them.
“Boonie, this is how science works,” says the astrobiologist. “We gather data. We look for correlations and trends. We come up with questions and try to find ways to answer them. It’s not all brilliant discoveries and eureka moments. It’s a hard slog through hundreds of wrong turns and incorrect hypotheses. We get piles of information, reams of notes, and computers full of data. Somewhere deep inside that pile of data, we may find what we’re looking for. Getting the right information out of mountains of data points is hard work.”
For his part, Boonie muses, “The thing about pilots is that we’re never lacking in attitude or ideas. Our main focus at work is problem-solving; from one second to another,…we are constantly evaluating our position, attitude, progress, and course.… I don’t know of an industry with a higher percentage of Type A personalities. It also means that most pilots can’t leave their attitude in the cockpit.”
More of the action in The Pouakai takes place in a U.S. Navy submarine than in an airplane, but Boonie makes good use of problem-solving skills honed in the cockpit to save the human race from annihilation. Full of action, The Pouakai, like all good science fiction, will also make you think about what might be.
—Reviewed by ALPA Communications Department Staff
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Happy reading!
This article is from the January-February 2016 issue of Air Line Pilot magazine, the Official Journal of the Air Line Pilots Association, International—a monthly publication for all ALPA members.
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