Cowdrey’s time-travel notions, clinging to orthodox cause-and-effect, offer as few surprises as his nasty, brutish, but...
Cowdrey’s SF debut: a conflation of four time-travel stories, some previously published in magazines.
In the 25th century, democracy is a long-forgotten concept: the Controller, ancient, sex-obsessed Xian Xi-Qing, rules the world from the city Ulanor. Her security chief, Colonel Yamashita, learns that a subversive group known as the Crux has stolen a just-invented time machine. It has sent operative Dyeva back to 2091, the year when a ghastly world war killed 12 billion people and laid the foundations of the current harsh, repressive regime. Yamashita launches his old pal, the ne’er-do-well agent Steffens Alexander, back in time to stop Dyeva. Reality survives, but not in the way that history assumes. Yamashita quickly founds an agency to produce timesurfers, agents dedicated to protecting the past (lest the present be changed also, wiping everybody out). Agent Hastings Maks and his half-alien sidekick Zo Lian, dispatched to 2050, must locate archcriminal Loki and interfere with his plans to change the past: things work out, but not as Maks expects. In another adventure, Maks must unravel the plot behind the kidnapping of his own son, Sandi; and finally he must unmask a conspiracy to kill the Controller and depose the current leadership—and find a way to save himself and his family from the war that ensues.
Cowdrey’s time-travel notions, clinging to orthodox cause-and-effect, offer as few surprises as his nasty, brutish, but otherwise undistinguished Asian-Russian-American future society. Pedestrian stuff, especially when (unavoidably) compared with Kage Baker’s brilliant series (The Life of the World to Come (p. 988, etc.).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31037-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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