Lucky is the reader who follows Alexander’s warrior-hero through this stirring Martian escapade.
In Alexander’s SF adventure, a disillusioned war veteran joins an expedition to restore a battle-destroyed Mars colony.
Leif Grettison is an astronaut and former military pilot in the far future. For most of humankind, it is the year 2726, but Leif hails from an older age; his repeat sorties into deep space (in suspended animation) and back, given the ironies of Einsteinian relativity, mean that his returns to Earth are separated by eras, giving him celebrity status as “Starman” Leif the Lucky. After a depressing first contact adventure with an extinct alien civilization, Leif returns to an Earth ravaged by the “Tribulation,” a solar system–wide war fought by opposing forces using deadly computer malware and viruses (that may still post a threat). More than 400 years after his last return, a new North American order, the Commonalty, embraces Leif as a returned hero. Future humanity is obsessed with a legend that tells of a Mars-colony complex, now lifeless, in which a young science prodigy named Oksana Vasylyshyn made a momentous scientific advance before being engulfed by the Tribulation. Now, an international coalition gives Leif and other representatives roles in a mission to Mars, ostensibly to reactivate the ancient, corpse-strewn (but still viable) colony for resettlement. But indications that a Chinese raid caused the community’s demise, as well as confirmation that “Martian Girl” Oksana really did exist, turn the project into a treasure hunt for Oksana’s discovery, a mystery prize of great strategic value. Much of the narrative is devoted to a Ben Bova/Kim Stanley Robinson–like hard SF account of rehabbing a Mars habitat. Grettison, introduced in Starman’s Saga(2019), is an ingratiating hero-narrator, an intelligent tough guy haunted by guilt, ghosts, and lost love while plunging ahead with a fatalist personal code (“This is a bad time to be philosophical, Leif. Deal with the situation in front of you”). Leif the Lucky is a battle-weary action hero disillusioned by power struggles, senseless cruelty, and petty nationalism, and he’s capable of being deadly when he has to. The story’s resolution, while feeling a little truncated, has particular strength and emotional weight; it rises above the norm in space-suited interplanetary thrillers.
Lucky is the reader who follows Alexander’s warrior-hero through this stirring Martian escapade.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798990585300
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Alton Kremer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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