Tense and gripping.
When crew members aboard the spaceship SLV Adamura discover that the planet Talos VII is sporting a strange alien artifact, they decide to investigate.
Xenobiologist Alex Crichton isn’t very engaged in his work aboard the Adamura. He's in the depths of grief after his partner, Layla, was killed on the planet where she and Crichton were colonists. But then the crew picks up something strange on the surface of remote planet Talos VII: a hole. An enormous, perfectly circular opening that was clearly made by a race of intelligent beings and seems to function as a huge speaker. After heated debate on whether the Adamura crew should try to investigate the phenomenon themselves or wait for a mission better equipped for such an exploration, Crichton joins a small team tasked with crossing the hostile Talos VII landscape to explore the alien artifact. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong, and as the team gets closer to the crater, their equipment, bodies, and minds start to fracture. What starts off as a bitter but contained tension between geologist and rationalist Volya Pushkin and the deeply religious team leader, Talia Indelicato, heats to a boiling point as supplies and patience run low. And Tao Chen, the timid chemist, struggles to stay out of their arguments until he hurts his leg and becomes a literal, physical pawn in their fights. Crichton, who was already on shaky psychological ground, becomes determined to make it to the site if only to honor what Layla would have done had she been in his place. Paolini effectively creates a gradual creep of dread as the doomed team slowly falls apart. While some aspects of the crew tensions fall a bit flat—the ongoing talking points between Pushkin and Talia about religion versus reason feel uninspired—the team’s descent into paranoia and violence is effectively rendered. Paolini understands that in the best character-driven science-fiction stories, the alien tech is never as interesting as the human relationships.
Tense and gripping.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781250862488
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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