A confident SF thriller that deftly addresses themes of resilience, faith, and the value of video games.
Thomas’ (A Sickness in Time, 2016, etc.) post-apocalyptic tale features a man hunting for his family and a lone technology company that’s survived the downfall of the power grid.
A series of electromagnetic pulses have rendered Earth’s electronic devices useless, throwing civilization back hundreds of years; most people call this event “the Change.” Vicious gangs, including the powerful, widespread Seventh, have hobbled law enforcement. Before the Change, FBI agent Walter Jackson had traveled from Memphis, Tennessee, to California’s Bay Area in search of his wife and daughter. Sarah and college-bound Maddie had left him because his work always seemed to be his primary focus. Now, eight years after learning Sarah’s grim fate, Walter remains in Sunnyvale as a cop, still searching for Maddie. One day, he and his partner, Hernandez, are investigating Seventh activity at an old roller rink. They break up a dogfighting pit, and one of the canines brings Walter to a corpse with a “red and black yin-yang” symbol tattooed on its arm. Using additional information from an acquaintance called Captain Anthem, Walter locates the Palo Alto company Terrestrial Economic Solutions. In their heavily guarded and somehow electrically powered underground facility, he finds a video arcade. A woman named Sloan Holt runs it, allowing teenagers to play nonstop and live on the site. She enigmatically tells Walter that TES researches “neurological topics.” The complex truth is that TES sent a manned mission to the Trappist star system; Sloan’s brother, Frank, was a crewmember with whom they lost contact after the Change. The author draws readers through his post-apocalypse in provocative stages. Echoes of Orson Scott Card’s Ender's Game (1986) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) set up the interlocking arcs of the characters, with each missing family in a broken world. The narration offers snarky critiques of how many people live today: “World-wide, precious snowflakes were...rediscovering how to survive without Twitter, skinny lattes, yoga pants, and beard wax.” He also mentions changes that happened before the EMP blasts; about mining asteroids for precious metals, readers learn that “Zuckerburg [sic] might have been involved after Facebook was broken-up by the Feds.” After Walter and Sloan meet, their quests combine; the mystery of Frank’s crew drives the plot, with Maddie’s whereabouts taking something of a back seat. Interpersonal drama at TES simmers as a man named Ashif Showkat pines for Sloan; he’s a Blender, maneuvering “bots” remotely from a special pod to explore the Trappist planet. Sloan, like Walter, puts work ahead of love and believes that Ashif “expected her to be his prize, which was both embarrassing and flattering.” Nostalgia is a force unto itself, as when Walter discovers the arcade, packed with hypnotic lights and sounds. Far from being regressive, the characters’ faith in the past proves to be a way forward. Thomas shows impressive skill at placing well-timed plot twists. Revelations about who finances TES, the origin of the EMP blasts, and Frank himself send the narrative soaring.
A confident SF thriller that deftly addresses themes of resilience, faith, and the value of video games.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-8906-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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