A tragicomic space opera with real heart.
Zimm’s debut SF novel sees two well-meaning men and an organic computer struggling to survive in a future dystopia predicated on corrupt dynastic and corporate oligarchies.
Though nominally controlled by the Federated Government, the galaxy is effectively in the hands of 35 powerful Families and 50 Great Corporations. The planet Misplaced-4, owned by the Tevil Corporation, is a hotbed of unemployment and corruption. Mike, an experienced Vakker, or spaceflight crewmember, has bought a crashed cargo shuttle there and is trying to run it as a bar and grill. Union and bureaucratic interference make this all but impossible until Mike partners up with the shuttle’s sentient organic computer, LaMancha, whose personality has been heavily influenced by OldEarth motion pictures from the 20th century. In the meantime, their 17-year-old friend Ghost, a technology whiz and possibly the product of a covert genetic splicing project, has been arrested for evading the oxygen tax and forced to join the Federated Space Forces. Like the militaries of several 19th-century OldEarth countries, the Space Force is hamstrung by an officer class largely promoted due to family privilege, rather than merit. After Ghost takes charge during an emergency, will he survive the repercussions of defying an entitled captain? Zimm structures the novel around multiple third-person viewpoints in polished prose, and he immerses readers in a well-realized SF setting that draws on real-life sociopolitical trends. However, not everyone will appreciate the repetitive communications protocol that has LaMancha and other characters continually identifying themselves and the people to whom they’re speaking. There are also sub-narratives (such as cargo-ship captain Tarak’s ordeal at the hands of aliens) that seem extraneous but are presumably included to sow seeds for future volumes. Still, Mike, LaMancha, and Ghost are enormously appealing main characters, as are some secondary players, such as Citizen Professor Ella Braun. The story takes some time to build up speed but will pull readers in with its fast-talking humor, satirical worldbuilding, and rebellious David-versus-Goliath tone.
A tragicomic space opera with real heart.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9798864793107
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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