Raphael Pond's Bell Tower

Writing this one is a little weird for me, I’ll admit. The central premise of Raphael Pond’s Bell Tower is that the internet, in the form of ocular implants known as Glow Domes, are leading to the inevitable downfall of the human race. I mean that seriously. The premise is that too much time spent online leads to brain rot. The jacked up thing is that I find it hard to dispute that. We all know the person who spends all day doomscrolling or watching their favorite show online and is incapable of critical thought.

Any member of Gen X (which I am) can clearly see that happening in our own time as, according to the media we don’t exist and there was no one born between 1965 and 1981. Watch your local newscast and the years my generation was born are skipped over completely. Per the media, what came after the Boomer generation (ended in the aforementioned 1965) was the Millenial Generation (Started 1981). The average American can’t think well enough to see the problem. Stupidification isn’t a problem that’s coming. It’s a problem that’s already here.

The main character of Bell Tower is a guy named Sasha and he’s nuttier than a Snickers in a barrel full of almonds. Dude is seriously so obsessed that he makes a psycho sports fan look like a casual. He’s like the guy who plays World Of Warcraft eighteen hours a day and spends two hours watching videos to improve his raid performance. Sash is the dude who spends his entire savings restoring a vintage car and then loses his house to foreclosure because he spend too much money rebuilding his intake manifold. Seriously, Sasha is into meditation.

The lengths that my man will go to in pursuit of the perfect meditation technique are sometimes horrifying. I’ve read a lot of stuff over the years. I’ve read everything from Military Science Fiction, to Romantasy (not on purpose) to a bajillion and seventy-three non-fiction works to include multiple works of scholarly history on subjects that are both horrifying and terrifying. Never in my life have I read anything that made me want to grab the main character and shout, ‘DOOOOOD, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?” worse than Sasha in Bell Tower.

Sasha is a man fighting for, as he sees it, the human race to prosper. He also has rather strong personal reasons, but getting too much into that is spoilerific with a side of Jimbo ruined it. His motivation is good. Some of the things the man does to initiate a specific kind of trance are downright insane. You’d have to read it to believe it. Dude is all kinds of amped up for his goal.

Where it gets weird is that his meditations produce magical results. I mean that in a literal sense. Teleportation, mind-reading and empathic transmission are all part of the process for the true believers. That’s where the fantasy part of Bell Tower comes from.

Bell Tower is a wild ride. It’s one of those books that will destroy an entire day because you can’t put the thing down long enough to accomplish anything. Seriously, I read this on my day off. I ended up ordering pizza for lunch because I wasn’t willing to take two minutes to make peanut butter and jelly. Then I got frustrated because I had to answer the door to get my pizza. My laundry almost didn’t get done. It was intense.

There is a lot of social commentary in Bell Tower disguised as really cool parts of the story. Given the fact that it’s not flat out lecturing I’m okay with that. I do kind of assume that Pond is not a fan of billionaires or internet addiction but he shows instead of tells so that’s okay. He does write about a lack of empathy displayed by people and blames it on, basically, internet addiction. In the book, people have become detached from each other because they spend too much time online and none in the real world. It makes me wonder if Pond makes his living in the behavioral or social sciences because it’s an attitude that makes a ton of sense. It’s also one I’ve seen referred to by people in those sciences.

There is a lot less outright violence in Bell Tower than there is in my usual fare. I kind of enjoyed that aspect of it. Not everything needs to be a fight even if it is, in fact, a fight. There was a little physical violence in the book but not a whole lot and some of it was actually portrayed in a negative way. Then again, Pond’s goal was never to write a book of Military Science Fiction and/or zombie story and I’ve got plenty of other places to get that, anyway. I’ve even got my own Mil-SF story started that I’ll get back to after I finish my current WiP. Probably. Unless there’s a sequel or I get to work on an upcoming collaboration with DT Read first.

Bell Tower a book that will continue to haunt for a long time, not because of Sasha and his nutcasiness but because a lot of what’s here is already happening or is a near term possibility. Glow Domes are basically a smart phone or Google Glass but they’re grafted directly onto the eyes. The creation of the “Scrolling Centers” that exist in the book, a place of work where people are paid to like and comment on existing news and entertainment posts aren’t hard to picture, except for the part where they’re actually an in person job. Scrolling sounds like a work from home gig if I’ve ever heard of one. And if there is anything that builds less human empathy than scrolling, it’s probably scrolling with no one else around.

I wish some of the meditation techniques existed in real life. Pond, in the form of Sasha, is right that a lot of people need healing. Unfortunately, while there are ways to heal in the real world, nothing is as reliably dramatic and sudden as some of the techniques listed in Bell Tower.

This is the first book I’ve read by Mr. Pond, but I’m hoping it won’t be the last. He’s got a great imagination and some serious talent. He’s worth your time.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Solosis Seekers

Bell Tower
Raphael Pond
Vine Leaves Press, 2025

Bell Tower is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Bell Tower