The beginning of what could be Corey’s most epic—and entertaining—series yet. Simply mind-blowing.
The first installment in the pseudonymous Corey’s Captive’s War series begins an epic narrative about a subjugated humankind and its tenuous survival in the midst of an ancient war.
When the godlike Carryx—who have “ruled the stars for epochs”—and their minion races arrive around the planet Anjiin, the humans who live there are conquered seemingly without effort. After one-eighth of the population is quickly killed, those worthy of saving are separated and taken off-planet, back to one of the Carryx’s world-palaces. Once there, the remaining humans realize they’ve finally had some important scientific questions answered: “Alien life exists, and they are assholes.” The humans’ predicament is simple: If they’re not beneficial to the Carryx in some way, their entire race will be eliminated. Trapped in a massive prison world with hundreds of other enslaved races, elite researchers like Dafyd Alkhor and Tonner Freis must stay alive long enough to prepare some kind of retribution against their alien overlords. While the character development is exceptional, the pacing breakneck, the emotional intensity off the charts, and the worldbuilding simply extraordinary, it’s the sheer scope of the narrative—the Carryx’s backstory, their “long” war, the countless sentient races they’ve conquered and/or destroyed, etc.—that will have science fiction fans befittingly blown away. The sense of wonder associated with the story’s magnitude is simply breathtaking. Here is just an example of one of the Carryx’s world-palaces: “The huge arcs of alien structure, one part building and two parts the bones of strange gods, glittered with a million other windows like theirs. The ziggurats that marched along the curve of the planet, poking their sullen bronze heads up above the clouds, were a cityscape twisted by nightmare, starkly beautiful but vast enough to induce vertigo.”
The beginning of what could be Corey’s most epic—and entertaining—series yet. Simply mind-blowing.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780316525572
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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 unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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