A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.
In Arthur’s sci-fi debut, humanoid aliens have arrived on Earth, offering miraculous technology, but young Jack Cousins knows they can’t be trusted.
Aliens, virtually indistinguishable from Homo sapiens, announce themselves on Earth in Las Vegas. They soon fill the marketplace with must-have toys exhibiting amazing tech that even the CIA can’t duplicate. The extraterrestrials explain they are welcoming man into the Directory, a vast federation of intelligent worlds. Their superscience soon ends Earth’s wars, poverty and disease. The aliens recruit thousands of young humans for “training” and ship them off-world to supposedly utopian destinations. Clean-cut Utah teen Jack Cousins, however, doesn’t believe in the visitors’ altruism. It turns out that Jack is the reincarnation of Tac-U-One, an alien troubleshooter secret agent who fatally crashed on Earth 16 years ago trying to expose a sinister scheme to corrupt the Directory and create a monstrous empire of slavery and exploitation. Jack becomes aware of this when he visits the site of Tac-U-One’s crash, and he embarks on a clever solo campaign against the invaders, using mind control, the media and legal maneuvering to nudge the aliens into revealing their unsavory true nature. Jack also tries to do right by his Earth family and his childhood sweetheart, Wendy, who are endangered by his resistance activities. Although the novel is geared to a YA audience, this series opener rarely talks down to its readers. Unlike other authors who have delved into the invasion genre, Arthur refreshingly avoids turning his novel into a tract on imperialism, colonialism or genocide. Indeed, notwithstanding some R-rated language and tastefully rendered acknowledgment of sex, readers may find it reminiscent of golden-age sci-fi tales of the 1950s. One detail does get short shrift in this outing: the fact that Directory society is built around the concept of reincarnation as an accepted reality. Future installments may expand upon that; the book ends with a peek at a planned sequel.
A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466382510
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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