The pleasingly escapist adventures of an ordinary dad and his friendly alien robot supercar; not as campy as it sounds.
In Cohen’s SF novel, a corporate executive becomes a guardian of the planet Earth, assisted by a shape-shifting sentient robot who commonly takes the form of a snazzy Saab car.
Bob Foxen is a middle-aged New Jersey widower, father, and observant Jew whose lifelong career in corporate finance has brought him little personal or professional fulfillment, due to his ethical nature. His old buddy Eddiereveals an amazing secret: He is actually a “Sentinel” for the United Star Systems, ensuring Earth’s safety in a hostile universe. Eddie, needing a break, lets Bob take the wheel for a few days. The wheel in question belongs to Eddie’s partner, a jet-black Saab car, Saabrina. The vehicle is actually a transforming robot and transdimensional spaceship—virtually indestructible, powerfully weaponized, and equipped with a female personality. Bob’s first job for the USS is an alien diplomatic-trade mission. It succeeds (thanks to Bob's MBA training), and Bob earns permanent employment as a Sentinel—but Saabrina has had her AI heart broken before, when a previous Sentinel partner did not survive the perils of the job. In this series opener, the author wisely takes few cues from the fondly remembered but cheesy Knightridertalking-car television show of the 1980s and instead follows the road signs set by the BBC’s long-running Doctor Whoprogram, one of many SF reference points for the novel (like the doctor’s TARDIS craft, Saabrina is bigger on the inside than on the outside, with “epic trunk room”). Cohen’s aliens, imperial military men and aristocratic types, sometimes with purple skin and horns, have a British flavor (“Austin pronounces the name with a deep, authoritative voice, almost Shakespearian in its timbre. The English-like accent helps”). The hero’s ethnic identity provides some avenues of humor, though Cohen never goes the full Mel Brooks route. The action-packed climax is pure Marvel Cinematic Universe (another stated inspiration) spectacle.
The pleasingly escapist adventures of an ordinary dad and his friendly alien robot supercar; not as campy as it sounds.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015
ISBN: 9781519083111
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2023
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
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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