Crucible

Crucible is the fourteenth Sigma Force novel from James Rollins, published in 2019. The premise is one of the more ambitious in the long series, weaving together the historical witch hunts of the Spanish Inquisition with cutting edge artificial intelligence research. A Sigma Force scientist named Mara Silviera has been working on a revolutionary AI project at a Portuguese university, and the project is destroyed in a violent attack that kills her colleagues and leaves Mara herself missing. The investigation that follows pulls Sigma Force into a confrontation with a contemporary version of the medieval witch hunting tradition, with the antagonists believing that the AI Mara was developing represents a literal manifestation of the demonic powers their inquisitor predecessors had spent centuries trying to suppress.

Rollins handles the science and history in characteristic style. The artificial intelligence material is solid enough to ground the speculation that follows, drawing on real research in the field while pushing the speculation in directions that the contemporary state of the art has not yet reached. The historical chapters on the Spanish Inquisition, on the long European tradition of witch hunting, and on the particular violence directed against women whose knowledge or independence threatened the authority of the church and the state are well researched. The action sequences move at the pace Sigma Force readers expect, with set pieces in Portugal, Spain, and other European locations.

What makes Crucible one of the more thematically substantial Sigma Force novels is the central engagement with the question of how new technologies replicate older patterns of fear and persecution. The contemporary antagonists, drawing their authority from a centuries old tradition of suppressing forms of knowledge they consider dangerous, treat the AI as exactly the kind of demonic threat their predecessors saw in the women they burned. The reader is asked to consider how the rhetoric and the violence of the historical witch hunts continue to operate in modern guises whenever a new technology threatens established authority.

The Sigma Force formula remains reliable. Painter Crowe coordinates from headquarters. The field team handles the active leads. The recurring antagonist organizations from previous books make their appearances. The science and history get documented at the end of the book in the way Rollins’s readers have come to expect.

For longtime Sigma fans, Crucible is one of the stronger late entries. New readers can pick it up as a standalone.