A badly translated and misogynistic sci-fi relic.
A surreal dystopian tale originally published in the 1970s is the Japanese author's first novel to be translated into English.
In the distant future, humankind has traveled to the furthest reaches of space, while civilization on Earth has regressed to a medievallike religious state. A student known only as K travels to the capital to sit for the Sacred Service Examination, a series of tests that will place him in a job inside the court of the Igitur, the papal government. To his surprise, he’s assigned to the enigmatic Planet Bosch Research Department. No one seems to know much about it, and the mystery only deepens as he begins his seemingly endless research. K starts delving into the secrets of the Igitur and of executed heretic Darko Dachilko, his connection to Planet Bosch, and even his connection to K. The story grows increasingly surreal and dreamlike, culminating in K’s arrival on the verdant Planet Bosch. Unfortunately, the book suffers from an artless translation, leading to tortured sentences such as: “ ‘That’s right,’ K says, his mouth full from the food his hands ply into it.” Worse still, the story highlights some of the worst tendencies of 1970s science fiction. The current convention offers organic worldbuilding which (ideally) unfolds with the story, but in this book, no facet of the fictional world goes unexplained, often through rambling conversations or long, quoted passages from in-universe books. Sex is thrown in randomly for no apparent reason, as when a beggar woman breast-feeds a starving K in an alarmingly erotic fashion. Not even inanimate objects are immune—a rocket is described as being “like a giant phallus ready to violate the heavens.” But Aramaki's treatment of female characters borders on abhorrent. Some are human, while others are clones or androids, but the only purpose any of them serve is to have sex with the male characters. In a particularly distasteful scene, a woman tearfully tells of having been repeatedly raped by multiple men from the age of 13 onward and, while still sobbing, is made to admit that she enjoyed it. By the next scene, she’s dead, and she’s rarely mentioned again.
A badly translated and misogynistic sci-fi relic.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-62006-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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