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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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