Solid, combat-ready speculative fiction with retro-feeling foes and battlegrounds.
In Manning and Rosone’s military–SF series starter set in the year 2093, three very different military recruits experience baptism by fire in a savage human-alien war on a distant world.
On late-21st-century Earth, in the Republic—a global coalition including the former United States of America—three young men decide to embark on off-world armed-forces careers. Harrison Kodiak is a burly youth with a college football scholarship and a social-climbing girlfriend who impulsively joins up when a recruiter impresses him about seeing the galaxy; Aiden Hall, a Chicago criminal arrested after an attempted robbery turned fatal, accepts soldiering as an alternative to prison; and Oliver Moore, a U.K. citizen connected to royalty, gives up his birthright to become a combat medic. The trio bond during basic training in the shadow of a looming war against other spacegoing Earth nations. However, a new threat emerges after alien contact on New Eden, an Earth-like, largely unspoiled world 12 light-years away. Like the Tharks in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ old Mars stories, the Zodarks are fearless, multiarmed, fanged giants who savor ground battles with swords, though they wield plasma artillery, grenades, and mobile platforms as well. They immediately clash with humans, and there are indications that an invasion of Earth will be on their agenda. Kodiak, Moore, and Hall are among the first reinforcement troops to arrive at New Eden for the fight. Manning and Rosone’s new series takes place in the same fictional universe as their earlier Rise of the Republic saga. This introductory installment is a lively space-traveling military-service drama that benefits from strong characterizations and robust action. The overall plot, however, feels fairly standard-issue, and the alien bad guys lack depth; they’re generic, bestial enslavers that call to mind the bosses in a video game. Descriptions of hardware and ordnance, though, derive fairly well from currently existing real-life technology. The book’s overarching themes are comradeship, duty, discipline, honor, and courage, and it comes as no surprise when the co-authors pay tribute to real-world veterans in their afterwords.
Solid, combat-ready speculative fiction with retro-feeling foes and battlegrounds. (science fiction)Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-957634-31-9
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Front Line Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
