A predictable tale that boldly goes where no one should have gone.
In Hugo Award–winning author Steele’s (V-S Day, 2014, etc.) latest novel, a popular science-fiction writer aims to colonize space.
Nathan Arkwright, a venerated sci-fi icon somewhere between Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry, was the creator of the Galaxy Patrol, a series of space-adventure novels which were developed into a television show and films. Upon his death, his estranged granddaughter, Kate, discovers Arkwright’s entire estate will be going to fund something called the Arkwright Foundation. She soon learns the foundation’s aim is to launch genetic material—harvested from the descendants of Arkwright and his circle of sci-fi author and editor cronies, among others—into the far reaches of space. When the rocket reaches a habitable planet, the ship’s computer will combine the oocytes and sperm into embryos and gestate them in an artificial uterus, thus creating the first human settlement in space, complete with copies of Arkwright’s first book, Galaxy Patrol, of course. Steele’s book is laid out in a series of novella-length stories and shorter interludes; throughout, characters bearing the Arkwright name shuffle their ways through events of the recent past or the far future, culminating in a groan-worthy and wholly unoriginal ending. The connections from one story to the next are generally too tenuous to be very compelling, leaving the book as a whole feeling like a collection of half-baked ideas that Steele couldn’t be bothered to develop into a full-length series. Many of the book’s real-world details are either inaccurate (the predominant language of India is not “Indian,” for instance) or peddle obnoxious stereotypes: religious protesters are uniformly portrayed as violent fanatics with comically misspelled protest signs, while a white character’s first experience on a Caribbean island is getting scammed by an official Steele describes as “a tall black man with a purple-dyed 'fro” committing an act of “third-world graft.” Suffice it to say, no one will feel compelled to preserve this book for future generations.
A predictable tale that boldly goes where no one should have gone.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8215-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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