New science fiction shoot-’em-up from the author of Echoes of Honor (p. 1076), etc. By the 25th century, humanity is finally winning its long war with the xenophobic Kangas. But then a human Battle Division intercepts a Kanga fleet traveling backwards in time, clearly intending to destroy Earth in the past! After a terrible struggle, only two ships survive to reach the year 2007: one contains a Troll(a Kanga cyborg with an enslaved, insane human brain)and BatDiv’s Colonel Ludmilla “Milla” Leonovna, whom the Troll thinks it’s killed. Lone sailor and US Navy Captain Richard Aston witnesses a battle involving nukes and UFOs high above the Atlantic, and he rescues what appears to be a dying Milla from her stricken ship. But Milla heals rapidly—though she looks like a girl, she’s actually immortal, thanks to the symbiont, deadly to nearly everyone else, in her blood—all of which she soon explains. Aston believes her story and sails into the US Navy base at Holy Loch, Scotland. But is there anyone else they should consult? Problem: the Troll is telepathic and can listen in on susceptible people. So, Aston and Milla must select their allies very carefully. Meanwhile, the Troll, having decided to enslave humanity, heads for the States to recruit an army of zombie slaves. A grim fight ensues; finally the Troll is killed and its ship captured, but Aston is mortally wounded, leading Milla to give him a blood transfusion; luckily, he survives, in the process becoming immortal too! Now humanity will have time to study the Troll ship and prepare for the Kanga invasion that, in Milla’s home universe, started the whole business. Moves along at a good clip, with lots of simple explanations, spiffy hardware, military acronyms, and whiz-bangs. Perhaps its teenaged target audience won’t care about Weber’s wretched attempts to compose female characters.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-57782-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Baen
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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