Reviewed by Lex Allen for Readers' Favorite

In Siphon: Power Comes With A Price by Jason Fox, a one-night stand between strangers, the male, an alien visitor from a distant galaxy, and the female, a normal Earth-born woman, produces a pregnancy and the birth of a boy who instantly becomes an anomaly when the first two people who touch him are instantly reduced to ashes. The baby is immediately whisked away and secured in the super-secret military base, Area 51, for examination and study. Years of solitary confinement, broken only by visits from doctors, a power-hungry Army general officer, and a female (motherly) caregiver, are all the boy knows for fifteen years. He finally manages to escape and finds a home he never had, but even that is ultimately denied him by a quirk of fate that leads to his capture and return to Area 51. When a superior alien army attacks Earth, Apollo is seen as the only hope for saving the world, but his power relies on a massive loss of human life. Why should he save the people who have kept him in solitary confinement for most of his life?

It's been a very long time since I've read a complete novel in two sittings (it would have been one sitting had I not been called away with a "honey, do" chore). Jason Fox's debut novel, Siphon, resonated so deeply with me on several levels that I couldn't put it down. Among these levels was verisimilitude, a sense of reality. A "must-have" for me in all fiction, but especially in science fiction, is making the unbelievable believable, and Siphon has that covered in spades. Another level is realistic character development and associated "human" emotions and actions, reactions, and interaction that beginning writers often struggle with, but not so this author. Siphon is a progressively orchestrated story that constantly grows in intensity, culminating in a plausible conclusion. While Siphon ends conclusively and wonderfully, the author has cleverly met the plausible conclusion with a hint of more to come. I hope so. I want to read it.