A delightful romp with spaceships, suspense, and assorted aliens.
Two humans join aliens in protecting Earth from hostile extraterrestrials in this third installment of an SF series.
Daytona Beach, Florida, mystery writer Jacob Casell has already saved the world twice. He previously befriended Arcon, an alien artificial intelligence, whose “swirl of energy” form usually resides in spheres of varying colors. They’ve thwarted menacing alien species that have threatened Earth. But Earth’s newest visitor from the stars, humanoid Silenna, hails from the same planet as Arcon. She comes in peace but brings bad news: Not only is an activated doomsday device heading to Earth, but a ship of unknown origin and intentions, which followed Silenna, has landed on the moon as well. In the course of his ongoing adventures, Jacob has locked eyes with Amy Goodwin, an aerospace engineer and part-time astronomer. This flourishing romantic couple team up with Arcon and Silenna to try to stop interplanetary baddies from executing whatever catastrophe they’re plotting. The heroes’ precarious mission puts them inside a spaceship—which one human eventually pilots—that drops them into action on the moon. Gittlin’s consistently fast-paced novella hits the ground running. The story, for example, wraps up one threat (from the second installment) and quickly introduces another. Tension rises along the way, including when Arcon, on a lunar reconnaissance mission, loses contact with his pals back on Earth. Unfortunately, the team knocks out one menace with such ease and proficiency that the subplot ends on an anticlimactic note. But the narrative is otherwise exciting, especially with its grim countdown as Silenna estimates the number of days until Earth’s potential doom. The author gleefully describes a mysterious spaceship, pointing out a “support beam shaped like a massive Martini glass” and such eccentricities as the infirmary’s “fuzzy” walls and ceiling. The tale—which features stock photographs—delivers an ending that, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggests another installment is in the wings.
A delightful romp with spaceships, suspense, and assorted aliens.Pub Date: April 14, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Entelligent Entertainment, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.
A Lambda Award–winning writer explores America’s dark history of brutalizing Black bodies in their latest work of speculative fiction.
Vern is a young woman raising her twin babies in a forest, dressing them in the hides of animals she’s hunted and hiding them away in makeshift shelters. Vern is being followed by ghosts and stalked by someone who butchers animals and dresses them in infants’ clothes. Both are connected to the Black separatist commune from which Vern has escaped. As a parasite takes over her body, Vern develops superhuman powers and begins to suspect that she is a test subject being used by the United States government. There’s a lot going on here—perhaps too much. The novel starts out strong; the portion of the narrative in which Vern and her children are fending for themselves in the wilderness has the feel of folklore, and the idea that she is haunted by the experience of her ancestors is evocative. As Solomon moves further into the realms of science fiction, though, their voice loses much of its force. This is surprising given the quality of the worldbuilding in An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), a dystopian tale set on a giant spaceship. The problem isn’t that the notion that Vern is part of a secret experiment conducted on Black people is implausible—Solomon references both the Tuskegee Study and the work of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who practiced new techniques on enslaved women. The problem is that the concept that drives the plot for half the novel is barely developed. With almost no evidence, Vern intuits that she is part of a shocking conspiracy, and, from that point, readers are supposed to take this as a given. Instead of building a compelling case, Solomon wrestles fantastic tropes into shapes that fit the frame they’ve created without effectively supporting it.
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26677-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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