A profound and full-bodied futuristic story of love, technology, and infinite outer space.
Clift’s SF series starter tells a tale involving laboratory-born children and an ancient relic.
In the mid-21st century, billionaire Howie Rich sends two rotating space habitats into low Earth orbit: Quivira and Halona. He decides that Noel Ward, an Arizona-based professor of planetary sciences, and his teenage daughter, Teagan, are needed on Quivira. The problem is that Noel hasn’t applied to move there, so Howie sends thugs to the Wards’ house to give them a “push” to consider relocating. Once Noel and Teagan do so, a scientist encourages Teagan and other girls to donate their eggs, which are used to grow seven “experimental babies.” Elsewhere, Teagan’s older brother, Hunter, after graduating from the space academy, has a very unexciting assignment: clearing space debris. However, his gig unexpectedly leads to his discovery of a vision-inducing crystal and a mysterious ship containing two dead space travelers who appear to be aliens. Meanwhile, Teagan and scientists disagree about whether a couple of the “Magnificent Seven” children are actually her “twins.” Her determination to take them away—and be the mother she dreams of being—lands her in a secure, prisonlike facility. Noel and Teagan’s mother, Clara, a botanist overseeing a seed-bank project on the moon, put together a rescue mission. As the Wards soon learn, Teagan is a very special young woman with a startling ability. It also turns out that other beings are looking for a lost crystal stone—not unlike the one Hunter found, and which other greedy people aim to steal.
Clift’s epic tale introduces a large cast and places them in a variety of delightful subplots. For example, a Chinese general seeks revenge years after her country lost the Great Cyber War; artist Julian Trace romances Teagan when she’s on Halona; and Nevaeh, one of Teagan’s children who becomes a scientist, vows to track down her mother. So many of these characters are unpredictable; even seemingly minor players (including space pirates) have significant impacts on the main plot or follow surprising narrative paths, such as one of the Seven who becomes separated from the others. All of this fuels a story that rarely slows down and covers several decades, ultimately ushering in the 22nd century. Clift’s shrewd writing loads the book with SF tech (microbots, medibots, policebots) and engaging touches based in science fact, including humans’ reliance on artificial intelligence and the moon’s relentless, machine-jamming regolith dust. There are myriad stellar set pieces, as when Hunter tries to deflect a meteor while piloting a spaceship: “He braced himself as a giant, crunching shudder rocked the capsule….The impact was brutal, throwing the ship and crew about like rag dolls. But the Sweeper, built to take hits from space junk, withstood the battering.” Still, the human element prevails in extraordinary fashion; there’s a strong theme of family as careers separate the Wards but don’t fray their ties, and Nevaeh and Teagan remain determined to find each other. Even humanoid bots interact just like their human counterparts.
A profound and full-bodied futuristic story of love, technology, and infinite outer space.Pub Date: May 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798990010703
Page Count: 441
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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