A love story meets theology meets The Matrix—but still comprehensible, for all that.
In this sci-fi series starter, a celebrated journalist/author gets romantically involved with two women as all three become embroiled in a cosmic gambit to save the universe.
In the late 1960s, Paul Tomenko is a Colorado counterculture writer who pens a bestselling book when he’s barely out of college. However, the fact that he's on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list costs him his college sweetheart—the ambitious, fiercely intellectual geneticist Margaret “Maggie Mae” Monahan. She has a shot at working for a government contractor, and Paul’s proximity could ruin her security clearance. Brokenhearted in the Rockies, Paul is consoled when his publisher sends him a new secretary, Alina “Allie” Briarsworth, a “ravishing beauty.” During a near-death experience, Paul has contact with God—at least the current version, named Eloah—and gains divine insight. And it isn’t good news; it turns out that the cosmos operates on Hinduist principles of creation and destruction, with God replaced each time by an ascended human soul. A DNA glitch in Neanderthal prehistory—and meddling by insectoid aliens—stopped the cycle. Paul, Maggie Mae, and Allie (who starts writing mystic sci-fi blockbusters that, unbeknownst to her, reveal the truth) are crucial to restoring the universe. But with whom will Paul make his ultimate love connection—on whatever plane of existence? Felyk (Damaged Right Out of the Box, 2012, etc.) starts his Infinity Trilogy with a book that salutes Kurt Vonnegut–style fabulism and nods to the trippier sci-fi novels of Robert A. Heinlein. The mind-blasting premise sounds like an electric-Kool-Aid-acid-test of patience, but the author tells it plainly, with wryly melancholy humor and nostalgic mile markers throughout the years; Tom Petty, Tom Snyder, and President George H.W. Bush make unobtrusive cameos. The story eventually vaults into a transhumanist future and bizarre religious ruminations that even Philip K. Dick might have found a bit much. Even so, it remains essentially grounded as a love-triangle tale even if the spirited female characters tend to be male-wish-fulfillment ideals—complete with a recurring avatar of Paul’s Hollywood screen-actress crush, Katharine Ross.
A love story meets theology meets The Matrix—but still comprehensible, for all that.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973434-27-6
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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