An intricate, compelling exploration of humanity and its core flaws and values.
Corley’s SF debut finds humans from the future travelling back in time seeking DNA to correct a species-ending mutation.
Four hundred years have passed since nuclear fallout from the Resource Wars left Terra uninhabitable and reduced the human population from 16 billion to less than 20,000 souls—the survivors included astronauts, off-world colonists, and those few who could be rescued ships from settlements not on Terra from the onset of nuclear winter. In the ensuing four centuries, that number has grown to two million, a quarter of whom live on the capital planet Regulon and the rest in colonies that, while lying as distant as 120 light years from Regulon, remain within effective reach due to an interstellar transport system predicated on dark energy. Technologically and scientifically speaking, humanity has not only survived but thrived. Geneticists can synthesize and manipulate any sequence of DNA to treat disorders and remove imperfections. Yet, for all these advancements another crisis looms: Humanity is falling increasingly prey to an irreversible “changeling” mutation that causes physical deformity and, with succeeding generations, mental degradation. The ruling Commission has mandated both sterilization and banishment in an attempt to purge humanity of the mutation. The situation grows so desperate that a team of four outcasts is sent back into Earth’s history via an experimental time machine to collect untainted DNA material. Will their mission succeed? Even if it does, can they prevent the Machiavellian Central Analysis AI and warmongering factions of the ruling council from committing genocide?
Corley relates events by way of an omniscient past-tense narrative, switching between points of view and employing straightforward prose to both establish the protagonists’ particulars and detail a complex futuristic scenario. Necessary information is worked unobtrusively into the text. The speculative element, while underpinning the action, never overwhelms the human component; characterization is a particularly strong aspect of Corley’s storytelling. The four mis-matched time-travelers (soldier Tauran, scientist Mitta, historian Sororis, and engineer Caedis) all have strengths and weaknesses, along with moral shadings that inevitably bring them into conflict with each other. While SF stories have often been used to explore the question What is human?,the author declines to interrogate the personhood of the changelings; he instead takes theirhumanity for granted while exploring unafflicted people’s reactionto them. The introduction of AIs—one subversive, one supportive, both shaped by humanity’s attitudes—adds an additional layer to the question. There is a sense that Corley has packed too much into one book. An excess of ambition can be detected in the narrative’s interpolation of biblical events into the time-travel mission—while the expedition as a whole is a cleverly worked-out MacGuffin leading to satisfying action—the encounters with the “ultraphysicalist” Yehoshua (“Yehoshua spoke softly, and the boy responded with a shy nod. The rebbe took the boy’s withered hand and massaged it gently, working from the drawn tendons in the hand down to the atrophied muscles of his forearm. The boy’s trusting smile grew, and his eyes closed in pleasure and relief”) feel both unlikely and unnecessary. These qualms aside, the novel succeeds admirably in establishing its premise and investing readers in the outcome. While not fast-moving, it gains pace and will carry readers along toward the denouement.
An intricate, compelling exploration of humanity and its core flaws and values.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2023
ISBN: 979-8988120346
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Milspeak Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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