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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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