Dystopian, cautionary sci-fi that leaves a lot to be desired—including an ending.
Three lost space shuttle explorers and some alien friends land on late-21st-century Earth and find America to be a devastated, brutal, and divided land in Aithal’s (Beyond the Milky Way, 2015) sequel.
NASA astronauts Terry Carter, Don Stockton, and Kim Williams accidentally went on a trip to the far-off planet of Etoo, where they met an older, wiser alien race that learned hard lessons about the dangers of runaway progress and eco-devastation. Now, accompanied by a somewhat Spock-like alien/human hybrid named Tom and his earthling father, Sam, the trio passes through a “portal” and arrives on Earth nearly a century after they departed. It turns out that after an (unnamed) African-American president was succeeded by an unqualified, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, media-manipulating, climate-change–denying businessman (also unnamed), everything went bad—and millions died. The United States has since been reduced to a few uneasily coexisting territories due to civil war, bigotry, and global warming. A cruel, Confederacy-like “Heartland” nation has revived slavery; African-Americans, Mexicans, and other minorities are casually murdered, and anyone accused of being gay is branded and exiled. An earthquake has shattered the West Coast, creating a parched, semilawless “Coastal America,” where the astronauts meet a surviving Native American tribe. To repair their vandalized spaceship, the heroes must trek to Los Angeles—now a self-sustaining island. Aithal’s second book in his Galaxy series shows signs of being quickly written in order to slam the results of the recent U.S. presidential election. As a result, it may hold the distinction of being the first sci-fi tale to comment on the Donald Trump presidency. But although Etoo, in the last novel, was an exotic, mysterious place, this one’s nasty, dystopic-states-of-America locale has been done numerous times before. That said, the fact that members of an indigenous tribe are the hardy holdouts for positive values in the wastelands is a nice touch. Most other secondary characters are thin, however, and remarkably unfazed by the extraordinary visitors. The fast-paced narrative ends with an abrupt cliffhanger, feeling like half of what it should be, compared to the longer, more detailed predecessor.
Dystopian, cautionary sci-fi that leaves a lot to be desired—including an ending.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Season Ball
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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