A smart, lively genre mashup that confronts past horrors and explores future heroics.
In A. Frosh and H. Frosh’s SF debut, a Brooklyn cab driver finds himself on an unfamiliar alien world.
It's 1977, and Mike Redolfo drives a taxi in a crime-ridden New York City. One night, after a strange passenger stiffs him, he’s summoned before his boss, Mallinson. It turns out that Mike has a tendency to rescue helpless people, which makes him a liability, so Mallinson arranges to have his hack license suspended.The now-jobless cabbie drives to the Fulton Ferry district to drink. Suddenly, a bright light appears, and Mike and his cab float into the air. He awakens on the planet Vost, where it’s revealed that he was taken from Earth because his DNA resembles that of a wanted “renegade.” This mistake has stranded him in the alien city of Catuvell. To get home, he’ll have to work for decades at one of the only jobs available: cab driving. He soon discovers that Catuvell, filled with flying vehicles, bizarre citizens, and soaring crime, isn’t too different from ’70s Brooklyn. In a parallel narrative in 1944 Prague, Marianna Kravová is a pregnant Jewish woman secretly living with Dominik Kominsky. When the Gestapo arrive, the pair escape with the help of resistance fighters; as they head to Budapest, Marianna sees that Dominik possesses a frightening hidden ability. The authors offer a tale that combines playful SF and harrowing historical fiction. Mike’s adventure on Vost is endlessly inventive, as when he upgrades his taxi in order to be able to maneuver in the incredibly congested traffic. Comments on present-day life abound, as in the line, “With driverless technology, the government can easily snoop on exactly where everyone is going.” World War II buffs will be fascinated by Heinrich Himmler’s presence in the story and his connection to other characters; the authors’ prose also shows an impressively dark streak as it satisfyingly portrays the infamous Nazi’s death. Although the plot sometimes feels conceptually crowded—the Celtic god Cernunnos appears at one point—it’s a chaos that’s endearing, and it leads to a joyous finale.
A smart, lively genre mashup that confronts past horrors and explores future heroics.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-916212-68-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Burton Mayers Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2020
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 deceptively quiet beginning rockets to a thrilling finish, preparing us for the next volume’s undoubtedly explosive finale.
The third installment of a necromantic science-fantasy series continues working at puzzles of identity and the meaning of loyalty.
Previously (Gideon the Ninth, 2019; Harrow the Ninth, 2020), sullen but brilliant necromancer Harrowhark consumed the soul of Gideon, her foulmouthed cavalier, to become a Lyctor, a semi-immortal officer in the Emperor Undying’s court. In a desperate attempt to preserve Gideon’s identity, Harrow deliberately erased the other woman from her memories, leaving herself confused to the point of delusion, unable to access her full powers, and vulnerable to enemies both within and without the Emperor’s court. This novel introduces Nona, a sweet but extraordinarily naïve young woman who appears to be in Harrowhark’s body but with Gideon’s golden eyes, lacking both necromantic abilities and any memories prior to six months ago. Nona’s been happy despite her precarious living situation in a war-torn city threatened by the necromantic Houses and their foe, the Blood of Eden. Unfortunately, what fragile peace she has cannot last, and everything depends on recovering Nona’s memories and returning to Harrowhark’s home in the Ninth House, there to finally release the deadly threat lurking in the Locked Tomb. But who is Nona, really: Harrowhark, Gideon, a blend of both young women…or someone else entirely? (The reader will figure it out long before the characters do.) Meanwhile, the Emperor and Harrowhark meet in dreams, where he recounts events of 10,000 years ago, when, as a newly fledged necromancer, his conflict with the corrupt trillionaires who planned to escape the dying Earth and leave the remaining billions to perish led to nuclear apocalypse. It’s pretty gutsy of Muir to write two books in a row about amnesiac characters, particularly when it may very well be the same character experiencing a different form of amnesia in each. This work initially reads like a strange interlude from the series, devoted to Nona’s odd but essentially quotidian routine in the midst of war, riot, and general chaos. But the story gradually gathers speed, and it’s all in service to a deeper plot. It is unfortunate that the demands of that plot mean we’ve gotten a considerably smaller dose of Gideon’s defiantly crude, riotously flouncy behavior in the two books subsequent to the one which bears her name.
A deceptively quiet beginning rockets to a thrilling finish, preparing us for the next volume’s undoubtedly explosive finale.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25-085411-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tordotcom
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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