Old-fashioned, fast-moving, flag-waving SF pitting a straight-arrow hero against hissing, Earth-coveting baddies.
In Ruesterholz’s SF debut, an alien spy sent to infiltrate Earth revolts and fights against the space tyrant who sent him.
It’s 2029, and tech magnate Robert Wilson has risen to prominence in government and economic circles. But Wilson isn’t the American genius inventor he seems. In fact, he is a humanlike alien named Marcus whose home world was conquered and exploited by the evil League of Planets, under ruthless dictator and warlord Anton Frozos. Marcus joined Frozos’ elite spy corps and came to Earth with a sham identity. As the son of ill-fated rebels who resisted Frozos, Marcus is actually working in secret against the empire. As Robert Wilson, he grew immensely rich from Arbor Ridge, his tech company, and secretly built a planetary defense system. In 2029, when Frozos had scheduled his takeover, Robert Wilson makes a preemptive move, emerging in public to reveal his incredible origin and unmask an international network of League of Planets collaborators and traitors, including the leaders of the U.S. and China. Overthrowing a popular American president (replaced by the female VP) and earning the complete trust of Homo sapiens is the easy part. Now Wilson and his cohorts must face an approaching alien armada. And yes, this is one of those SF yarns deploying the genre cliché that Arbor Ridge galactic-shooter video games are really recruiting tools to clandestinely train squadrons of star-fighter pilots. Ruesterholz’s narrative is akin to those stolidly retro space epics attributed to L. Ron Hubbard that seem to stand with one moon boot in tomorrow and one moon boot firmly in the 1950s, possibly even earlier. He doesn’t bloat the narrative, but when third-act breathless battles pile on, one feels a more epic heft might be warranted here. Other old-school facets: The author salutes the American spirit, God, family, business partners, and the sweet notion that an alien threat could unite Earth of the 2020s in a mighty display of cooperative fellowship. Well, it’s not called science fiction for nothing.
Old-fashioned, fast-moving, flag-waving SF pitting a straight-arrow hero against hissing, Earth-coveting baddies.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293928-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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