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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
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