SF wizardry imbues fresh life into the Arthurian classic!
Due to reverse-engineering experiments with alien technology, a Welsh American military officer is flung back into British Isles in the Dark Ages and adopts the persona of Merlin the magician while striving to return home.
A diplomat’s daughter, Lt. Col. Marilyn Morgan is a resourceful U.S. military officer whose Welsh background and language skills come in very handy when she participates in a secret government project in Waxahachie, Texas. Remains of a long-buried extraterrestrial spacecraft have been uncovered. The most functional device is the “Glass Table,” a crystalline thingy that apparently served as the craft’s engine. But as Marilyn’s team (including her lover, Philip) experiments with activating the astounding relic, Marilyn is whiplashed into a dimensional portal: “Her surroundings swam into focus as her vision cleared: a dimly lit cave, stalagmites and stalactites encrusted around an all-too-familiar artifact.” Now a transparent one-way barrier separates her from her comrades. Marilyn’s fellow scientists can perceive and interact with her, but no solid matter seems able to return through the portal. Also, a localized time-distortion zone is in effect. Exploring her surroundings, Marilyn deduces she has landed in ancient Wales, circa 500 C.E., and the first inhabitant she meets is a friendly youth called Uthyr. With her odd uniform, stun-gun wand, bag of survival medicine, and knowledge of chemistry, the officer has stumbled, physically and phonetically, into the historical role of Merlin, the healer, wizard, and adviser to the once and future King Uthyr/Arthur. Passing herself off as a male and playing her supernatural “fae” image up as required, Marilyn/Merlin ingratiates herself as a sage and wonder-worker to the natives and tries to amass enough influence in this distant land to enable her return trip. For her, weeks are passing, while for the frantic team back in the Texas lab it’s only hours. Time is crucial for the marooned Marilyn for many significant reasons.
The notion of a SF takeoff on the Camelot legend is not an entirely fresh idea. Mark Twain, of course, riffed on it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and SF grandmaster Poul Anderson blended space opera with Dark Ages chivalry. Here, Wilson pulls off the considerable feat of taking a mythic plotline everybody knows (or at least we think we all do) and making it fresh and offbeat. The hoary aliens-are-responsible conceit notwithstanding, readers are there with Lt. Col. Morgan as she fulfills—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately—major touchpoints of Arthurian lore. As the narrative point of view shifts to the vantage of the ancient Britons, there are unexpected depths granted to peripheral or invented characters from previous bardic chronicles by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Tennyson, Mallory, Boorman, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Monty Python, and more. Female characterizations are especially robust, though a harsh chieftain, Gorloys of Cornwall, also gets his dramatic due. A postmodern touch is that Marilyn and her associates are Harry Potter fans, and J.K. Rowling material colors her magic, adding some levity without seeming merely silly. This volume only covers the opening portion of the Arthur/Merlin saga; follow-up books are prophesied.
SF wizardry imbues fresh life into the Arthurian classic!Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798991804509
Page Count: 514
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
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