A bracing start to a darkly vibrant saga about a ravaged Earth.
In this post-apocalyptic sci-fi debut, an enslaved race of cyborgs becomes caught between two warring clans of humanity.
On an Earth devastated by storms and blighted with deserts, a cyborg race (the cy) struggles to finish building a tower called Sky Lance. During a nasty tempest, an old cy engineer named Moshan is about to evacuate the tower when he learns that someone is still up on Troposphere five. He soon locates a female cy named Brinn, who works at the tower’s base as a healer. She’d wanted to see the miracle of the Sky Lance herself and so ventured up there. Moshan finds her, however, only to be struck by lightning and thrown miles to the ground. Cy Hadran, meanwhile, is a lowly Standard Unit who cleans garbage in the trenches radiating from the tower’s base. He finds Moshan’s body and is stunned when the old cy awakes. Moshan says that the Remnant, the mythological group of humans who fled a ruined Earth, have rescued him from death and given him a mission—to free the cy from the slavery of King Strauss and destroy the tower. This is indeed the plan of the General Order of the Democrats, who live on space stations orbiting Earth and must wrest the planet back from the secret machinations of the Dirt Queen, Gen. Ember Gallia. Martin begins his new series with an addictive fusion of over-the-top concepts (reminiscent of Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass) and streamlined sci-fi action. His prose conveys the narrative’s apocalyptic tone in tight, gripping jolts, like in the description of cars and refrigerators as “sun-scorched hulks of debris...the bones of some extinct race of robotic creatures.” Martin’s characters are likewise excellent, including the Dirt Queen, a patchwork creature with one bionic eye, “blue, and eerily perfect, the other gray, sunken, and milky with cataracts.” Most compelling of all is the notion that without Earth, “survival would be...a protracted act of wilting.” The finale promises raised stakes for the heroes in the next volume.
A bracing start to a darkly vibrant saga about a ravaged Earth.Pub Date: May 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5309-2672-5
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
