A peculiar guide to large-scale cooperation and achievement, disguised as a sci-fi fable.
Diverse alien cultures predating the Big Bang face the contracting of their universe and attempt to survive the Singularity apocalypse.
This sci-fi novel by Zecola (The Race to Cure Parkinson’s Disease, 2011, etc.) draws a quick picture of the teeming universe before the storied Big Bang, when space was in a period of gradually increasing contraction. The early encyclopedia-like (akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) chapters describe four alien worlds and the intelligent life on them. They also reveal how these beings reacted once they perceived an approaching apocalypse, with their universe inevitably fated to collapse into a tiny, hot, dense Singularity. Some religion-centered beings simply opt to do nothing, believing their souls will persist in the afterlife and that’s that. On a different planet, egg-shaped inhabitants of surpassing intellect—but not the best at public administration—could eventually think of a solution (in fact, it was these aliens’ runaway technology that triggered the approaching doom). But they lack the means to implement it, as internal revolt wracks their flawed society. Another civilization includes invisible mutants who are able to elude the giant, saurian predators roaming their planet. But the Singularity threatens this sphere’s equilibrium. And one world hosts three intelligent life forms who “cohabitate and thrive in a shared setting,” an ability that could “prove very useful” in the challenges ahead. In his short book, Zecola’s strange payoff is that the beings on each of the four planets have some of the key ingredients to solve the problem of how to survive the Big Bang. Only by seeing past their differences, communicating with one another, and fully cooperating in the centuries-long countdown will they be able to pull it off. The author lucidly shows this as an example of supreme project management, deftly pinpointing examples of altruism, foresight, and the act of leaving the “forces of evil” at the door. (Or the wormhole, or the porthole, or whatever.) Employing puns in the names of places and species (“Mulligans,” “Broadcoms,” etc.) gives the material a fable aspect. Readers interested in extensive project management will discover some helpful advice here. But traditional genre fans will likely find that the tale delivers lots of bullet-point sermonizing.
A peculiar guide to large-scale cooperation and achievement, disguised as a sci-fi fable.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 77
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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