An often impressive debut of an author in deft control of a mind- and galaxy-spanning SF premise.
In Overman’s SF series starter, the crew of a nascent Mars colony and a lunar pilot struggling with addiction play key roles in a crisis as a fleet of alien ships approaches Earth.
This outer-space epic is set on multiple stages in the year 2061. A Louisianan named Ben Allspot employs his formidable skills as a pilot, doing a job on Earth’s moon to send money back to his estranged family, but everything he does is tainted by his all-consuming addiction to Carbodine—an insidious performance-enhancing narcotic that escapes routine drug testing. The drug is particularly plentiful in the ramshackle corporate complex where he works. On Mars, eight pioneering astronauts arrive on a three-year NASA mission to establish a colonial beachhead. Virtually from the start, an accident tests their problem-solving skills and depletes their resources, forcing them to search for frozen water sources. This, in turn, leads to the discovery of ancient Martian organisms, a scientific milestone that, on Earth, triggers the wrath of a Houston-based fundamentalist Christian church. Meanwhile, deep in the cosmos, a sentient race of “Trees” (creatures that become rooted during a plantlike phase) has risen to staggering intellectual and technological heights. They’ve also become enslaved by weasel-like mammals called the Koombar. When the latter had nearly destroyed themselves with greed, belligerence, and shortsightedness, the merciful Trees violated their noninterference policy to rescue them, but the Koombar betrayed them. Meanwhile, four black, cylindrical, faster-than-light machines have been detected beyond the orbit of Pluto, headed toward Earth.
As all the pieces come together, the pages turn faster. Overman’s keen prose shows a gift for plainspoken but effective description that renders a number of hard–SF concepts into lay terms with plenty of wow factor: “This room was probably once filled with ice. Over time, the ice has sublimed…but it is an uneven process. Small air currents and pockets of dissolved gases and other things would have caused the ice to evaporate faster in some areas than in others. These things sculpted the surface, resulting in what we see now.” At another point, the story addresses the difficulties of working with antimatter. He also succeeds in getting into the heads (and, in the case of the alien space probes, the automated programming) of distinctly different life forms and cultures; the Trees and the Koombar argue their points of view most effectively. That said, the human characters, such as the troubled Allspot, tend to be better developed when they hail from places close to the author’s Mississippi Delta origins; the female characters, in particular, are largely a two-dimensional bunch. Overall, the book is reminiscent of a cinematic space epic by James Cameron or Roland Emmerich in which one gets carried away by the staggering adventure, wonder, and danger of it all—only to realize later how little of it felt fresh and new. Still, the sequel promised by this novel’s ending will be eagerly awaited by readers after they complete this star trek. An often impressive debut of an author in deft control of a mind- and galaxy-spanning SF premise.Pub Date: June 6, 2011
ISBN: 9780984589043
Page Count: 452
Publisher: FutureWord Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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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