Whether one believes God created everything in six days (or at least had a hand in the quasi-scientific compromise of so-called intelligent design) or that we're masters of our evolutionary selves, one

can't help but wonder how the mythologies and folklores of quite separate civilisations bear a remarkable resemblance to and consistency with each other, and how history seems to repeat itself.

Imagine then, as Hal Duncan does, that everything has already been written down, to the least significant of details, that it has been written in the blood of angels, and that this horrid and glorious book has been bound for eternity.

Ink - The Book of All Hours: 2 is the final part of Duncan's story that began with Vellum, published in 2005, which explored and challenged people's complacency about what happens in their lives.

Vellum set up Duncan's basic premises and introduced the key characters. Ink dips into the psyche, exploring past, present and future across universes or dimensions, to bring out perspectives on consciousness of pre-destination.

Duncan has taken sci-fi fantasy to a new frontier, weaving together folklore, mythology, history, religion, belief systems, science, time and dimension. The result has been not just a literary delight, with lyrical illumination, but a philosophical challenge to his readers about their complacency towards events unfolding around them and when it's time to say enough is enough.

Whether the reader is atheist or religious, Duncan's case for predestination extended in Ink requires familiarity with the themes addressed in Vellum.

'One little thing changes everything is all it takes. One little thing, one day, and your whole world breaks,' he writes. Ink dances across different realities to bring out how seven people with consciousness of pre-destination set out to challenge The Book of All Hours - each has his or her reasons, from revenge to respect for humanity. Think The Matrix and Neo's passage to awareness.

The journeys of the seven, and the intercessions of their chi, or energy, surge through The Book of All Hours in a Mobius loop, bringing chaos to order and order to chaos as war between the Covenants and the Sovereigns unfolds.

Duncan has done extensive research to pull together ancient mythologies and historical events, and finds fascinating patterns amid chaos. Ink is full of imagery and reference that remind the reader how fragile and shallow reality can be without perspective, and how treacherous perspective can be in altering reality.