A studied, intricate look at a futuristic age of alien contact.
Cochran’s SF novel explores ideas about alien communication.
Evans Ezra Evans is a bankrupt and hunted poet: Not only does Evans lack a source of income, but his work has people out to kill him. The offended people in question are a group called the Cannots (short for Cannot Be Grouped), who follow a manifesto that few, if any, people fully understand. They are sure that they don’t like Evans, whose writings somehow contradict their worldview, nor do they approve of certain policies governing contact with aliens. The aliens (known collectively as “the Paraunion”), who have made their existence known but have yet to reach out to humanity, communicate in a language called Para that is extremely complex—so much so that it’s nearly impossible for most humans to begin to understand it. When communicating in Para, “a person in hails of laughter can continue to answer you and comment simultaneously on the nature of their amusement.” Evans interviews for an opportunity to learn Para at an institution called Border University. He is accepted and is set to leave everything he knows for the next 16 years, with the goal of learning Para and gaining the ability to communicate as an ambassador. Early in the narrative, it seems as though Evans has been plucked from a work like William Gibson’s Neuromancer—the novel’s frenzied cyberpunk setting includes people identified as “boyzoids” and “glitterbeasts,” new hip drugs, and references to an event called “the Crush”—but the story takes a turn when Evans sets off for the unknown. With the urbanized dystopia behind him, Evans has a world of opportunity ahead, and it turns out that there’s more to discover than just language. The text is dense; passages such as “The object of his affections was Arbaun-Da-Felentual, who he gendered race-opposite from himself” have a lot to parse. Patient readers will be rewarded with an imaginative story that doesn’t fail to surprise.
A studied, intricate look at a futuristic age of alien contact.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7395781-1-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Bee Orchid Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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