Tense and gripping.
When crew members aboard the spaceship SLV Adamura discover that the planet Talos VII is sporting a strange alien artifact, they decide to investigate.
Xenobiologist Alex Crichton isn’t very engaged in his work aboard the Adamura. He's in the depths of grief after his partner, Layla, was killed on the planet where she and Crichton were colonists. But then the crew picks up something strange on the surface of remote planet Talos VII: a hole. An enormous, perfectly circular opening that was clearly made by a race of intelligent beings and seems to function as a huge speaker. After heated debate on whether the Adamura crew should try to investigate the phenomenon themselves or wait for a mission better equipped for such an exploration, Crichton joins a small team tasked with crossing the hostile Talos VII landscape to explore the alien artifact. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong, and as the team gets closer to the crater, their equipment, bodies, and minds start to fracture. What starts off as a bitter but contained tension between geologist and rationalist Volya Pushkin and the deeply religious team leader, Talia Indelicato, heats to a boiling point as supplies and patience run low. And Tao Chen, the timid chemist, struggles to stay out of their arguments until he hurts his leg and becomes a literal, physical pawn in their fights. Crichton, who was already on shaky psychological ground, becomes determined to make it to the site if only to honor what Layla would have done had she been in his place. Paolini effectively creates a gradual creep of dread as the doomed team slowly falls apart. While some aspects of the crew tensions fall a bit flat—the ongoing talking points between Pushkin and Talia about religion versus reason feel uninspired—the team’s descent into paranoia and violence is effectively rendered. Paolini understands that in the best character-driven science-fiction stories, the alien tech is never as interesting as the human relationships.
Tense and gripping.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781250862488
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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