An engaging, personality-driven tale with detailed SF worldbuilding.
In this second installment of an SF series, colonists on an alien world face unexpected perils.
Wretlind’s sequel, following Out of Due Season (2022), is set on the alien world of Tishbe, to which a fugitive group of the 241 followers of Father Elijah Jonas had fled when he led them away from the violent shambles of Earth. Life had been hard but predictable in their settlement, the City of Nod, for the ensuing 39 years, but as this installment opens, that seems to be changing. Lake beds that have been dry for decades (the colony usually only gets about 10 inches of rain a year) begin to fill with water, and caves seem to be inhabited by vicious alien entities the colonists haven’t seen before. These alterations split the settlement elders, some of whom believe they’re harbingers of a planetary “Shift” while others dismiss their significance. Caught in these rifts—and in the broader changes engulfing their new world—is the engrossing book’s core cast of vivid characters: “clumsy and weak” apprentice scribe Micah Victor; budding engineer Joel Page; reluctant medic Christina Grigsby; 20-year-old Miriam Michaels, who’s been thrust unexpectedly into the status of family matriarch; and a handful of others. When this group embarks on a journey across the unknown regions of this world, it unearths clues to a deeper mystery than any of the colony’s elders ever imagined. Wretlind does a skillful job of interweaving the personal conflicts of his young main characters with the marvels they find (and the dangers they face) as they explore Tishbe’s wildlands in search of answers about the Shift. And Tishbe itself, “a fantastical world with wonders yet to be discovered,” is deftly delineated and will keep readers turning the pages.
An engaging, personality-driven tale with detailed SF worldbuilding.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-08-794916-1
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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