A rambunctious space opera and metafictional celebration of the power of imagination.
In Pascal’s SF novel, a TV actress who is secretly an interplanetary/time-travelling agent ventures through different eras and dimensions seeking her MIA elder brother.
The author here compiles the three installments (some previously published) of her Zygan Emprise trilogy. In the present-day (more or less) universe, Shiloh Rush is an ingenue starring in the SF streaming series Bulwark, fighting Hollywood-scripted galactic evil. But this is actually a cover story for Shiloh’s astounding off-screen existence, which she shares with her gay British co-star William Escott. They are “catascopes,” secret agents employed by the powerful Zygan Federation of the Andromeda galaxy. Equipped with near-magical weaponry and techniques (including shape-shifting, size-shifting, levitation, teleportation, resurrection from the dead, and time travel), Shiloh and the impressively scholarly Escott (nicknamed “Spud”) embark on fraught missions all over the place (including one in 1947 to Roswell, New Mexico, that will have repercussions), often in the company of alien creatures who resemble everything from bears to whirlpools of liquid or vapor to “one being who looked like an animated Erector Set.” Shiloh’s overlord is the Omega Archon, a godlike entity with multitudinous rules for his minions; terrible punishment (simulated burning in literal Hell) awaits those who transgress—and Shiloh often transgresses. The Zygan Federation’s chief antagonist, it seems, is Theodore Benedict, an unimpressive office-clerk type who marshals the frightening resources at his disposal (including a gallery of well-placed traitors among the “Zygfed”) in a scheme to accumulate power and confound the Zygan Archon. Shiloh’s chief motivation is the fact that her cherished elder brother John Rush, a physics genius who was recruited as a Zygan catascope years earlier, disappeared on a mission six years ago. She hunts for him at every opportunity, her quest eventually taking her to parallel worlds and different dimensions. Is John alive, dead, trapped, or a secret ally of the slippery Benedict, rebelling against the increasingly malevolent Omega Archon?
While the narrative displays a certain Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tongue-in-cheekiness, the overall effect of the novel is more akin bingeing on the vintage European Heavy Metal graphic magazine—with a lot of Joseph Campbell and Neil Gaiman on the side. (Just for openers, there is a sortie to 2,000 years in the past that puts none other than Jesus Christ, alias Immanuel the Teacher, in peril.) The story luxuriates in both high and low culture, sometimes threatening to grow twee but righting itself with breathtaking flip-flops between the good guys and bad guys and those in between. Various plot threads reference The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Paradise Lost, Jason and the Argonauts, Star Trek, Norse mythology, and the two Arthurs—Conan Doyle and C. Clarke. The material is safe for a sophisticated YA-and-older readership; it’s the heavy slurry of fantasy jargon (like “Plegma,” “Syneph,” “M-fanning,” and “Octopodal”) and more arcane classical idioms that are tough to navigate. By the conclusion, the magical art of storytelling itself has become woven into the narrative, recalling William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). It is a trip worth taking.
A rambunctious space opera and metafictional celebration of the power of imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Amphitrite Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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