A flighty, serio-comic excavation of SF tropes and doomsday conspiracies.
In Hopkins’ SF novel, an American newlywed couple must find an ancient, powerful alien relic from Egypt to prevent the destruction of mankind.
The author begins his Powers That Be SF trilogy with this international caper, which opens in primordial times: Nascent human life on Earth is monitored by bodiless beings, the Light Specters, who believe humans are vital to the universe and must be safeguarded. The entities erect a pyramid-shaped beacon in ancient Egypt, effectively preventing extraterrestrial interference; certain key humans (starting with the Pharaoh Khufu) receive special powers to aid in the task of protection. But a rebel faction, the Dark Specters, spend millennia obsessively scheming against humanity. Finally, in the early 20th century, a Nazi officer, manipulated by Dark Specters, removes the eternal power source of the long-buried beacon, an uncanny metallic ellipse with a Tolkien-like Ring-of-Power influence over anyone in its vicinity. Finding and returning the missing talisman to its proper node are the responsibilities the Powers That Be (PTB), a super-secret extra-governmental agency made up of elite humans, a few benevolent aliens, and androids. In 2044, with time running out before an alien invasion, the PTB recruits Rachel Alexander Haig, descendant of a key human bloodline, newly wedded to Owen Haig, an adventurous banker fond of quoting Indiana Jones and other escapist-fantasy Hollywood properties. Action and peril follow the sexy, young, game-for-anything couple throughout an itinerary of North African deserts and antiquities. Despite the apocalyptic danger and violence, the tone throughout is glib and flippant, sometimes getting a little too arch and twee for its own good (“Am I ready for my close-up?” asks a character in 1944, paraphrasing a famous movie line not to be uttered until 1950). Epic mayhem and grisly gore co-exist uneasily with comical slang (such as “noggin” and “skedaddle”), but one can’t say it isn’t the proverbial roller-coaster ride. In an introduction, the author states that the materials’ roots lay in a gag comic strip he did based on paranormal conspiracies and Area 51 mythology. The book includes an actual bibliography of sources for all of the conspiratorial and archaeological references.
A flighty, serio-comic excavation of SF tropes and doomsday conspiracies.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780996506779
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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