A wild if somewhat predictable ride; slightly unwieldy but reasonably entertaining.
In the conclusion to the Pandominion duology (following Infinity Gate, 2023), two multiversal empires hurtle toward mutual annihilation.
Since neither the organic Pandominion nor the machine hegemony recognizes the other as sentient beings, negotiation is impossible: There can be only complete destruction of the other side to remove the inconvenience. The potential for reconciliation is slim indeed, lying in a small and desperate band consisting of Topaz, a young woman evolved from a rabbit; her best friend, Dulcie, a former member of the machine hegemony; Essien and Moon, two mentally unstable, renegade Pandominion soldiers; a digital copy of Hadiz Tambuwal, a dead physicist; and Rupshe, a liberated AI. Rupshe believes that they must appeal to the Mother Mass, a planet-size intelligence who may have the power to halt this looming apocalypse. Of course, the location of the Mother Mass is one of the Pandominion’s closely held secrets, and trying to uncover it will attract unwanted attention to our fugitive heroes. Cue plenty of desperate situations from which the protagonists make hairbreadth escapes; but even though literally billions of background characters die, there never seems to be much doubt that they will ultimately triumph (especially since the story is narrated from a time period after these events). But in the midst of that breakneck action, Carey wants to give the reader a lot to think about, beginning with the central Aesop: Xenophobia is bad, and we must respect sentient beings regardless of how alien they look, think, or behave. Related to that, we have the classic SF warning that it’s unwise to hand over your infrastructure to a complex machine, because it’s eventually going to become self-aware and start having opinions. There’s also something in there about the dangers of an oversize, autocratic bureaucracy filled with workers focused more on personal advancement than helping people. But if the author is offering a message about manifest destiny and environmental conservation, it’s decidedly mixed: While Carey vividly depicts polluted, devastated landscapes, the story strongly suggests that since there seems to be an infinite amount of resources, there’s always another unspoiled world to escape to whenever things get too bad.
A wild if somewhat predictable ride; slightly unwieldy but reasonably entertaining.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780316504690
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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