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EXOGENE

This exciting and thoughtful story marks McCarthy as one of sci-fi’s most promising new talents, and bodes well for the...

The second novel in McCarthy’s Subterrene War series (Germline, 2011, etc.) is a standalone tale that encompasses theology and existentialism in its story of a genetically engineered warrior discovering her own path.

Each Subterrene novel follows a different character involved in a brutal future war between the United States and Russia over natural resources in Kazakhstan. This time, McCarthy focuses on Catherine, one of the artificially grown super-soldiers used by the United States as frontline combatants against the Russians and their allies. Unlike the journalist protagonist of the previous installment, Catherine knows little to nothing about the motivations behind the war, and has been conditioned to focus her entire existence on killing enemy soldiers. Writing from Catherine’s perspective, McCarthy captures a fascinating mix of naïveté and ruthlessness, as Catherine, grown in a tank to the equivalent of 15 years old, is unfamiliar with everyday human life but knows everything about battlefield tactics and killing efficiently. The novel starts as Catherine is beginning to experience “the spoiling,” a degradation process that affects all genetics after they’ve been in the field for two years. Rather than submit to the mandated “discharge,” or suicide, Catherine escapes from her unit and begins a journey through battle-scarred Russia and the nuclear wasteland of North Korea, in the process questioning the principles that have so far defined her existence. A big part of that involves teasing out her own concept of God, and McCarthy portrays Catherine as a complex mixture of zealotry and skepticism, depicting a mindset that is effectively outside human experience while also very much identifiable. Although the novel takes place in the midst of a war and involves a number of battles, it’s less a war story than a rumination on identity and faith, anchored by a protagonist who brings surprising and moving depths to familiar science-fiction concepts.

This exciting and thoughtful story marks McCarthy as one of sci-fi’s most promising new talents, and bodes well for the series’ forthcoming third installment.

Pub Date: March 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-316-12815-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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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

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GOLDEN SON

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 2

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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