By their natures, anthologies are often hit and miss: there are misses aplenty here, but the hits, when they come, are solid...
A collection of 22 short stories featuring several big names of literary fiction experimenting with science-fiction themes and concepts.
Introduced by editor Weisman, a veteran of the SF landscape, the anthology presents a broad spectrum of stories, though only a few display conventional integration of the science of science fiction. For every story grounded in scientific developments, there is another that is best described as magic realism. If any one story embodies the overall tone, it may be Chris Tarry's “Topics in Advanced Rocketry,” wherein the conceit of a rocket ship serves as mere vehicle for ruminations on family dynamics, the created celebrity, and 21st-century disaffection. (Lampshading the point, the rocket itself has fake dials which our "astronauts" cannot control at all.) Several stories stagger about under the weight of their own interpersonal relationships with hardly a plot to be found (J. Robert Lennon's “Portal,” Jonathan Lethem's “Five Fucks,” Jami Attenberg's “In the Bushes,” Jim Shepard's “Minotaur,” Rivka Galchen's “The Region of Unlikeness”...). That said, other stories in the anthology straddle an effective and potent line between the tight plotting of good SF and their own literary sensibilities: Julia Elliott's “LIMBs” is a poignant exploration of technology enabling discovery of one's personal past—and how one must outwit that technology to regain one's agency. Bryan Evenson's “Fugue State” is a dreamlike zombie-plague tale that leaves one unsettled—an understated contrast to Junot Díaz's “Monstro,” which handles the same theme but with more pyrotechnics. Deji Bryce Olukotun's “We Are the Olfanauts” creatively condemns our emerging media-and–safety-net global culture, and Eric Puchner's “Beautiful Monsters” is an enjoyably queasy take on eternal youth.
By their natures, anthologies are often hit and miss: there are misses aplenty here, but the hits, when they come, are solid and lingering.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61696-210-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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