If variety is the spice of life, then this otherwise accomplished volume could use some more seasoning.
An acclaimed SFF novelist’s first short-story collection encourages her characters to talk it out, for good or for ill.
Leckie likes to explore a theme across several works; for example, her Imperial Radch trilogy and related novels (including Translation State, 2023) examine issues of autonomy and what a person owes to themself versus their obligations to family and society at large. In these stories, some of which are stand-alone, some of which are set in the Imperial Radch universe, and many of which are written in the world of her short fantasy novel The Raven Tower, the prevailing theme is communication. Several stories involve people from different species or backgrounds trying to talk to one another, navigating cultural and biological differences or poor translations. Leckie examines the issue in a multitude of scenarios, including a wounded human anthropologist encountering an alien on a spiritual journey, an unwilling elderly diplomat and an angry young priestess from opposing political sides who must ally when their flier is shot down, a conflict among space-traveling dinosaurs resolved via a song, and a peevish and perhaps deluded young man’s attempt to will a change in reality itself. Some may be disappointed at how few Imperial Radch stories there are; what is there will definitely appeal to fans but is also accessible to those who haven’t read the books, even if they don’t pick up on all the nuances. A full half of this volume is devoted to The Raven Tower stories, which are bloodily clever and darkly comic but overlap far too much in plot. They mainly concern mortals and local gods making contracts with one another for power but desperately seeking loopholes. The many different approaches Leckie takes to her subject are amazing, but when brought together, the overall collection comes across as more than a little repetitive.
If variety is the spice of life, then this otherwise accomplished volume could use some more seasoning.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780316553575
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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