Diverting space action, breezy banter, and dismemberment, leavened by media spoofs.
In Pearce’s SF novel, an embattled reality-TV director is tasked with making an action-hero out of a burly ex-military man, but their pilot episode, shot on an alien-infested space station, could be their finale.
In the far future, balding and out-of-shape videographer-producer Ian MacIntyre is given a last chance to salvage his failing career by broadcast production company Galactic: He’s to head into the deep cosmos and do a reality-TV program based on the heroics of a manufactured idol, “Captain Charisma.” The actor chosen to work with MacIntyre and play the title role is brawny, ingratiating ladies’ man Joe Drake—Texan, ex-military, and fairly fearless (he also acted as “narrator in Death of a Salesman. A Capulet extra in Romeo and Juliet. Most of my work occurred behind the curtains”). MacIntyre is not initially impressed. En route to Galactic’s preferred shooting-location planet, the duo is sidetracked at the gigantic Minnix Ore Space Station 27, crossroads for a variety of alien civilizations that are generally hateful toward each other. The human female commander has an issue, one that MacIntyre thinks could make for a nice try-out episode: A large, beetle-like insect pest, possibly smuggled aboard as alien livestock, has gotten loose and is chewing through vital cabling and infrastructure. Captain Charisma can play exterminator before the lens of MacIntyre’s ever-hovering camera drone. (“The bigwigs insisted filming a bug hunt would make for good drama—a hero blasting a critter into a gooey mess. Fine by me, except for the conditions aboard this space station. Lighting? Terrible. Audio conditions? Worse.”) But the bug turns out to be bigger and far deadlier than imagined, and the aliens aboard turn out to be harboring schemes and secrets. Ian’s vengeful ex-wife, Rose, once his partner-in-holovids, has arrived on Minnix herself, accompanied by a vainglorious cyborg adventurer, determined to do her own reality-TV franchise and put MacIntyre and Drake out of business—if they are not killed first.
With this volume, the author begins a new space-opera series, The Green Charisma Chronicles (a pre-existing novella, The Cinematographer’s Conscience, fleshes out the backstory). Readers should have no trouble following the action, unless they are somehow unfamiliar with the we-only-wish-it-were-SF phenomenon of reality TV. The high action quotient here could qualify the material as combat-military SF with a heaping helping of showbiz satire on the side as ethics go out the window (or airlock, in this case): everyone is motivated by big bucks and boffo ratings. Oddly, the overall vibe and plot mechanics hew closer to yesteryear’s spoofs of prime-time network television and Nielsen numbers rather than home in on the 21st century’s media landscape of internet channel views, livestreams, and social-media trends. Lighter elements of the story include MacIntyre’s blossoming odd-couple romance with a sexy, shapely lizard girl and various other farcical enological developments. The mayhem and battles, when they come, are in the slam-bang pulp tradition and do not let up. Fans of the prolific Harry Harrison should latch onto this series with great delight.
Diverting space action, breezy banter, and dismemberment, leavened by media spoofs.Pub Date: June 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798989832118
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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