All ahead warp factor 2 to lighthearted fun.
Members of the last human settlement on Earth blast off on a quest to save the planet in Shvartsman’s SF novel.
Dhawan is just your average earthling living in post-apocalyptic times; he’s trying to enjoy the sunrise with the hottest girl in town when they both realize said sunrise has begun to go awry. Enter Airvolt, harebrained author of The Gathered Wisdom of the Human Species. (As seen in the accompanying black-and-white illustrations by Butova, Cvijanovic, and Liu, Airvolt is a dead ringer for Ben Franklin by way of Hobbiton.) Airvolt quickly realizes that the protective barrier shielding what’s left of the Earth is breaking down rapidly and is in need of immediate replacement. The search for that replacement constitutes the bulk of Shvartsman’s irreverently quirky space odyssey—it’s a narrative that can be affectionately described as interstellar idiocy. Clear nods to everything from Idiocracy to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy abound, and they’re all part of the breezy fun. The title, of course, references Voltaire’s classic Candide; somewhere between the fourth and fifth dimensions, Dr. Pangloss is winking at Airvolt and company. Media-literate readers already know that a MacGuffin is a time-honored storytelling device that authors use to spur their adventures into motion—Shvartsman explicitly dubs the protective device his intrepid earthlings are seeking the “MacGuffin mark XII force barrier.” If only they had enough credits to wrangle one from the space bazaar! Along the wacky way, Dhawan—accompanied by his vapid crush, Rada, and the aforementioned Airvolt—encounter more goofball aliens than George Lucas could pack into the Mos Eisley cantina on ladies’ night. “All of this had occurred a very long time ago,” readers learn. “Before the Mafia took over Mexico, and before New York came to be known as Old York.” If that puts a smile on your face, the crew of the Theseus(another literary joke) have plenty more where that came from. But in space, can anyone hear you scream with laughter?
All ahead warp factor 2 to lighthearted fun.Pub Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781951064068
Page Count: 324
Publisher: UFO Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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