A rewarding SF adventure on a particularly vivid alien world.
A human refugee colony on the planet Kamaria finds clues that a vile machine-creature race that conquered Earth has infiltrated this world as well.
In this SF sequel, Bruno continues the Song of Kamaria series that began with In the Orbit of Sirens (2020). Humanity fled a solar system conquered by the Undriel, a homegrown cyborg race that assimilates humanoids (rather like the Borg of the Star Trek series, but more insectoid in their augmentations). On the strange, distant world of Kamaria, a generation of Homo sapiens that built cities lives in an uneasy peace with the Natives, a birdlike species, some flightless, some not, called the Auk’nai, technologically adept yet prone to mysticism. The sudden slaughter of a formidable forest predator, held in esteem by many Auk’nai as a living god, presages dire clues pointing to the conclusion that the dreaded Undriel—or something with the race’s technology—have crossed the cosmos and landed on Kamaria. When a monstrous Auk’nai-like thing with biomechanical attributes kidnaps Cade and Nella Castus, the young adult children of hero pioneers Denton and Eliana Castus, a rescue expedition heads off into forbidden, eldritch realms and Lovecraft-ian caves, looking for answers. This volume is what the SF cognoscenti like to call a “planetary romance,” somewhat trickily defined as a story in which a striking world’s environment and culture drive and practically define the narrative. Indeed, the Auk’nai part of the tale fairly obviously reflects the fates of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples who were confronted with (and ruined by) European colonization/imperialism (“Humanity had a bad track record”). A complication here is that Kamaria’s biosphere includes tangible metaphysical elements—deities or the near equivalent, spirit forms, and other great whazzits—that come into play. Sometimes, these facets are thrilling (action and combat in the second half of the story come pretty much nonstop). Other times, the superpowers and otherworldly allies seem a little convenient, affecting the author’s well-hung cliffhangers (including an open ending). Or, as Denton notes, “anything is possible now.” Genre fans will be transfixed by the results and imagination at work and perhaps give additional points for a key character being deaf, something the Star Trek series only worked into one TV episode (after some persuasion, too).
A rewarding SF adventure on a particularly vivid alien world.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73464-706-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Tom Bruno Author
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.
“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream- and rust-colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446591
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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