Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants is the 2016 science-fiction debut novel by Canadian author Sylvain Neuvel. Narrated through a series of case-file interviews, transcripts, news-clippings, mission logs, and personal diaries, the overarching story tells of Rose Franklin, a physicist in charge of solving the mystery of an ancient artifact she came in contact with seventeen years prior. When the artifact proves to be a single body part from a humanoid relic left behind by an alien race, Rose and her team must uncover the remaining anatomical puzzle pieces and decipher their significance. As the first book in a series called The Themis Files, Sleeping Giants has been called “a stellar debut” by Kirkus Reviews, and “one of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory” by NPR.

Narrated by an unknown interviewer, the story begins in the Black Hills of South Dakota. On her eleventh birthday, Rose Franklin, riding her new bicycle near the city of Deadwood, abruptly falls through a giant hole in the ground, landing in the palm of a massive metal hand buried nearly seven meters deep. The military seizes the hand immediately, assigning scientific experts to examine the relic. Not much is gleaned about the hand other than it is roughly six thousand years old and, despite being comprised of the extremely scarce heavy metal iridium, is “inexplicably light given its composition.” Without much information to extract, the hand is demilitarized and placed into storage.

Seventeen years later, the hand is transferred to the University of Chicago for further research. Rose, now an accomplished twenty-eight-year-old physicist, is put in charge of the research project and tasked with deciphering the symbols embossed on the hand. With an inquisitive nature, Rose suspects there are more body parts to be unearthed. But she tries not to let her past encounter with the hand muddy her judgment. Meanwhile, Chief Warrant Officer Kara Resnik and her fellow American copilot Ryan Mitchell monitor Syrian airspace for the presence of nuclear weaponry. Kara and Ryan’s stealth helicopter detects radiation, malfunctions, and crashes to the ground. When they come to, Kara and Ryan realize they have landed atop a giant metal forearm that perfectly aligns with the hand placed under research at the University of Chicago. As a result, Kara and Ryan are recruited by Rose to help solve the mystery. A French-Canadian linguist, Vincent Couture, also joins the team.



In a search that spans the globe, Rose and her team eventually unearth every body part of what amounts to a giant humanoid robot. When the puzzle pieces are found, the parts are secretly excavated and transported to a secret subterranean base in Denver, Colorado. The global population soon finds out about the mission, resulting in unease, paranoia, and the escalated threat of another world war. As all this is happening, the crew is overseen by a cryptic interviewer who guides and protects their interests. The interviewer, to whom The Themis Files belong, has incredible power and influence on par with that of the sitting US president. The only other figure equal in stature to the interviewer is an unidentified entity that he agrees to meet with in Washington D.C.

The unidentified entity is a descendant of alien warriors that contacted Earth as part of their outermost colonization mission. The alien race aimed to use giant war machines to protect their colony against invasion. Following the danger, the aliens left a single robot behind, dismantled it into several pieces, and spread it out across the globe. This was done so that when humanity was technologically advanced enough, it could operate the robot as a means of communication or annihilation. The time has arrived, and the aliens are watching to see what becomes of their imperial legacy.

Kara and Ryan are tasked with “driving” the robot, but they fail when the robot only responds to Kara. Vincent successfully maneuvers the robot into activation, which proves that he and Kara are descendants of the alien race and the only ones, based on their genes, who can operate the machinery. Greek geneticist Alyssa Papantoniou is enlisted to examine Kara and Vincent. An accident occurs during the exam of the robot, resulting in the destruction of the Denver International Airport. Many people die as a result; Rose is believed to be among them. The US government can no longer keep mum, so it exposes the top-secret project to the public. The government buries the robot below the Puerto Rico Trench so that competing nations cannot harness its destructive power.



The interviewer conducts a clandestine meeting among non-American nations to invest in an effort to retrieve the robot. This new top-secret mission is spearheaded by Alyssa, but her incompetence leads to the plans being publicly exposed. The U.S. makes the case on moral grounds that the robot ought to be returned to America. The interviewer agrees. Upon retrieval, the U.S. grants the robot to the U.N. to be used in the Earth Defense Corps, an international conglomeration meant to fend off future alien incursion. The novel concludes with an epilogue, in which Rose awakens on the side of a road in Ireland. She has no memory of the past four years during which the secret mission was conducted but can remember everything before the events transpired.

Sylvain Neuvel is a linguist and translator based in Montreal, Canada. Sleeping Giants has been called “a fascinating first novel” by Publishers Weekly, and “a remarkable debut…reminiscent of Max Brooks’s World War Z” by Library Journal (debut of the month). The book is the first in The Themis Files series, preceding Waking Gods (2017) and Only Human (2018).