A science-besotted, stellar spectacle that skillfully takes adventurous readers across eons.
Some highly advanced technocrats foresee an extinction-level catastrophe looming for Earth and initiate a new civilization on Mars—but their superscience has its limits.
In this novel, Hiltner pens an SF mini-epic with a semi-experimental ambiance. A clue upfront is that the book begins with an epilogue and concludes with a prologue. Cosmic, hard-science descriptive and lyric prose emphasizes the immensity of space and the insignificance of humanity before a storyline coalesces. Homo sapiens have reached a pinnacle of perfection, with the abolition of wars and poverty, erasure of disease, and typical life spans extended via gene modification to 1,000 years. Reproduction must be carefully managed, of course, and some 4 million people congregate in the advanced, utopian city-state of Uinkaret (with pockets of comparatively primitive outliers living elsewhere in the undeveloped wilds of the planet). But scientists determine that one of Earth’s periodic extinction-level events—this time, an apocalyptic volcanic eruption—will doom Uinkaret. Leading engineer/industrialist Rotfach Theoretrics and his close, long-lived friends (environmental scientist Alfrieda Praxis, legal expert Konstantina Oblation, population-control director Humboldt Noraxton, and artists Shlater Curayan and Zabana Oblation) are prominent in the Autonomous Resettlement Kolony project to establish an expatriate human civilization on the nearest habitable planet, a plant-filled and blue-skied Mars (another clue, by the way). When the seismic catastrophe arrives early, the meticulous colonization effort must adapt or face the likely end of humankind.
Midway through the narrative, readers who have not recognized all the clues will realize that these events are all unfurling not in the far, far future but in the distant past. In the novel’s present—the early 21st century—the NASA Mars robot vehicle Curiosity only begins to trundle across the ancient Mars settlement site (“Haven”). Will contemporary folks ever decipher the traces of what happened so many millennia before? On one level, this is a variation on a hoary SF trope, the “Shaggy God Story,” wherein ancient, cherished myths and legends (Noah and the Ark, giants, Eden, Atlantis) turn out to have valid, high-tech SF foundations. But Hiltner does not oversell the gimmick, instead going with a fairly dispassionate, dialogue-sparse narrative voice, often lapsing into first-person plural, to emphasize the wonder of deep time and humanity’s place in the stars. There are rhapsodic passages of science jargon sufficiently abstruse as to be nearly indistinguishable from poetry (“The solar wind of charged particles emitted from the violent surface of our sun streams outward through the heliosphere’s cocoon of our solar system to where interplanetary space meets the realm of the interstellar. Here, at the termination shock, the solar wind slows to a subsonic speed”). An especially impressive detail salutes a common fly swept up in the chassis of a Mars-bound rocket. Although reduced to carbon, a few molecules of the insect succeed in reaching the Martian surface, which constitutes one giant leap for fly-kind. Compact in size yet vast in scope, the book will give readers much to think about even if thin characterizations are placeholders more than anything else. Genre fanciers who prefer the ray-gun stuff should get their thrills elsewhere.
A science-besotted, stellar spectacle that skillfully takes adventurous readers across eons.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-98521-540-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Kniemst Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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