An often-gruesome speculative yarn in which male malevolence predominates.
An ailing human scientist on a Mars colony faces mental and physical horrors during an expedition to her supposedly desolate home planet in Valentine’s SF novel.
In 2030, Earth’s atmosphere is eroding, which leads to mass extinctions. The surviving remnant of humanity travels on spaceships to Mars, where they gradually dig into the red soil to escape deadly Martian radiation and maintain stifling, subterranean colonies. Married doctors Shelby and Drake Hilton are among the heroic pioneers of the Mars Administration of Space and Extraterrestrial Research. Now withered in their 60s in the 2060s, the still-prominent couple are ordered by MASER president Alex Wilson on what seems like a suicide mission: return to the supposedly dead Earth to investigate why long-range scans indicate microbial life in the biosphere. Not even Shelby’s terminal ovarian-cancer diagnosis stops Wilson from forcing her to make the trip, and Shelby later realizes that she and another female scientist onboard have long been betrayed and abused by men. Earth, it turns out, is exhibiting more animal/plant/mutant life than MASER told the crew, but things do not improve for Shelby, who experiences horrific trials. Valentine, in his author bio, describes himself as a “drag queen superstar author” and “the face of the marriage between the serious, introspective nature of writing, and the campy, flamboyant nature of drag.” This novel’s narrative tone is dead serious rather than campy, even during climactic moments of prose delirium. Still, there are elevated emotions in this work, which features bondage, sexual assault, murder conspiracies, and other horrific acts committed by disgusting men (human and nonhuman) against women and against the Earth; there’s even a rather cryptic reference to Donald Trump and his Mar-a-Lago resort. The story features a hyper-acceleration of climate-change anxiety, even in an age of numerous “cli-fi” works; also, untypically for SF, the story focuses on older characters, which is an intriguing commentary on the genre in itself.
An often-gruesome speculative yarn in which male malevolence predominates.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9864638-0-3
Page Count: 339
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2022
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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