The novel “Zona III: Foundation” by Fred G. Baker was published for the first time in 2023. It’s the third book in the Zona series and follows “Zona II: Sabertooth Uprising“.
Grant Taylor and his group of explorers return to St. Petersburg after their time in Zona. They meet with Boris Ustinov to discuss the status of the foundation created to protect the Zona and how best to keep it secret. Unfortunately, among the people who have received samples of plants that exist only in Zona is Victor Romashin, who wants to exploit them and to do so intends to conduct an independent expedition.
The situation has become complicated but the people who support the secrecy around Zona intend to prevent anyone else from discovering its location. There’s another area where the new expedition can be directed but the dire wolves that inhabit Zona are afraid of it because they’re convinced that there are deadly presences there.
Fred G. Baker builds on the events of the previous two books to further expand the story. Each book has its own plot but there’s a common thread that ties the various books together, so you need to read them all to understand the events and characters.
The issue of Zona’s secrecy has been an important theme since the first book of the series and in “Zona III: Foundation” there’s also an element that recalls spy stories. In this book, this is not only meant to be used to surveil someone and find out if they know something about Zona but also to manage true and false information to protect Zona. The danger of the secret coming to light stimulates the protagonists to devise a plan that draws explicit inspiration from the strategies of the KGB to prevent the nature and location of Zona from being discovered.
Like the previous books, “Zona III: Foundation” tells mainly an adventure story with surprises and twists of the kind that generally contribute to keeping the tension high. Grant Taylor and his friend Tamara Kostova decide to join the new expedition with the excuse of leading it in a region of Siberia where neither GPS signals nor those of the Russian Glonass navigation system are received.
Even for Grant Taylor and Tamara Kostova the area where they take the expedition is full of unknowns and after the warning of the dire wolves, they know to expect dangers. Fred G. Baker focuses again on the sense of the unknown by inventing what can be considered variations of the plot already seen in the first book. In my opinion, they work because the author creates a new environment with different species offering a sense of novelty that keeps the reader’s attention.
The important addition is given by the fact that the new expedition is set up by a person who has as his goal the exploitation of everything that can make him earn money. That’s used more than ever to add some reflections on the themes of exploitation of natural resources as opposed to their conservation. These are important themes throughout the series that become even more explicit.
The other strong points of the novel are more or less the same as the previous books. The struggle for survival in unusual and unknown conditions is explored once again. These are conditions in which the camaraderie between the characters emerges, which in this case, may also include members of the new expedition. Behind it is Victor Romashin, who is only interested in the commercial exploitation of species that exist only in Zona, but the members of the expedition are not all bad people.
“Zona III: Foundation” is another very adventurous novel that includes an important element of intrigue and a deepening of the theme of ecological conservation. All this confirms that this is a series you can like even if generally you don’t read science fiction. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
