An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.
In Cohen’s SF series installment, a New Jersey widower, who’s partnered with a powerful talking spaceship to protect Earth, faces major life changes that include an alien invasion.
This series began with Saabrina (2015), and it offers a straight-faced approach to a way-out premise: Bob Foxen, a middle-aged Everyman, has taken a sharp turn in his life by becoming a “Sentinel”; he’s charged with secretly guarding the security of an unsuspecting planet Earth and other worlds under the aegis of the mighty United Star System, or USS. Bob tackles this task with his extraordinary artificial intelligence partner, Saabrina—a transdimensional robotic spaceship that looks like a sporty but modest Saab automobile but can defeat an entire space fleet. Saabrina can also create a humanlike holographic projection of herself in various guises and has access to a vast knowledge base. Eight years into their partnership, the duo have survived perils and assignments on Earth and on other USS protectorates. Now Bob’s daughter, Rebecca, is about to get married to a man who has a high command post in the USS, and Saabrina is happily taking part in preparations. Soon, however, a crisis arises involving a powerful group of car-shaped alien robots called Firebirds that resemble the familiar Pontiac vehicles of the same name. When the avaricious Empire of the Greater Noble Houses moves to conquer a disputed border planet, Bob and Saabrina undertake its defense, but the heroes are blindsided by a hostile Firebird on the enemy side. Saabrina is seriously wounded, and Bob requires emergency USS medical treatment. Even if they recuperate, how can they defeat such a formidable foe? And what about Rebecca’s big wedding ceremony?
Cohen’s offbeat narrative is seriocomic (or perhaps serio-cosmic) in tone, alternating between upper-middle-class domestic dramedy and surprisingly sparse space-battle intrigues. A lengthy and vitally important aside may broadside the reader in the middle act, in which a traumatized, offline Saabrina dreams vividly of a human life in surreal, 1980s-ish “Neo York” as a graduate student at Columbia University, trying to defend her dissertation on graphic novels amid a whirl of dates, vampires, werewolves, and anime clichés. AIs aren’t even supposed to be able to dream of electric sheep, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, let alone attend a magic college, so readers may wonder just what’s going on; a few other key points remain unresolved in this installment as well. Other than the car-robots, the novel’s alien characters often feel like escapees from a low-budget SF TV show, including Graustarkian counts and European-type decadent royals. Other pop-culture ingredients and shoutouts reference the comic strip “Peanuts,” the graphic novel Maus, Arthur C. Clarke, Doctor Who, Russian literature, columnist Russell Baker, and Star Trek: “She looks again, farther out, letting the stars stream by. She hears Kirk speak the words: ‘Space, the final frontier.’ She has lived them.” Even with the unanswered questions, this entry remains a comfortable ride for genre fans who’ve settled into the bucket seats of Cohen’s peculiar universe.
An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 9780998976433
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Pengriffin Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
