A futuristic quest with an offbeat prehistoric twist but uneven execution.
In Hopkins’ SF sequel to The Golden Ellipse (2021), Owen and Rachel Haig must save humanity again in an action-packed treasure hunt.
The story begins 90 million years ago, when a massive spaceship is abandoned in the jungles of the future Brazil. Within it are priceless gems, Cretaceous-era dinosaurs, and a pathogen bomb. Fast-forward to 1928, when explorer Charles Pike rediscovers the ship near the Brazilian city of Fordlândia and maps out its location in a notebook; it’s then kept in a London lockbox until 2044, when the world is reeling from a horrific alien invasion. The villainous CEO of SATStar Industries, Griffin Pike (descendant of Charles), makes sure that the incident is blamed on the secretive organization the Powers That Be (PTB), which he regards as an obstacle to his quest for power. In the aftermath, Owen and Rachel Haig are reunited; they later join the PTB, which immediately sends them to uncover the lost spaceship. Meanwhile, PTB administrator Nina Madsen and special agent Terrence O. Flynn Gilliam, who were previously Owen and Rachel’s companions, are held hostage and tortured on a different spaceship. Luckily, they receive unexpected assistance and eventually rejoin Owen and Rachel’s travel party; to combat the jungle’s many threats (including aliens, dinos, and cannibalistic humans), they join forces with Griffin’s team. Later, this alliance frays, and a free-for-all determines the fate of humanity. During the story, a character quips, “We just went from Star Wars to Indiana Jones in a heartbeat,” and this description aptly summarizes what readers can expect as they make their way through this adventure tale, which includes plenty of snappy dialogue. Newcomers are likely to find themselves lost without the additional context of the first installment of the series, however. The first half of the story struggles with overly slow pacing, and the jumps between different time periods are sometimes jarring. The coverage of LGBTQ+ material is mixed; some queer characters are likable and heroic, while others are problematic.
A futuristic quest with an offbeat prehistoric twist but uneven execution.Pub Date: May 4, 2023
ISBN: 9798986233826
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Hopart Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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