This insightful, engaging SF tale argues that it’s never too late to fix the world.
This post-apocalyptic novel about star-crossed lovers emphasizes the resilience of the human spirit.
Weik von Mossner’s SF tale is set in the near future in a world where climate change rightly has struck back hard at humanity. The Romeo in this case is Jake Alvaro, who works for NY SAFE, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that acquires high-priority medical supplies for the New York metropolitan area. Every morning, Jake goes out of his way to drop by the coffee shop Soma so that he can visit his secret Juliet, Shavir Tayard, the woman with a “smile he never knew what to make of.” But there’s one big problem. In addition to working at Soma and a community garden, Shavir is considered a domestic terrorist. That’s because she’s part of a gang that steals puppies being raised as illegal animal meat in a country that shut down industrial meat production and switched to plant-based items. The group illegally gives the pooches to animal lovers rather than the police. One of these dogs is Shavir’s constant companion, a mastiff named Sam. After Jake and Shavir become involved, their secrets are exposed as they meet the people in each other’s lives. These include Jake’s cousin Carrie; her cop husband, Dan; their sickly daughter, Zoe; and Shavir’s canine-stealing friends. Coming from two diametrically opposed worlds, the lovers continually break up and reunite as society crumbles around them because scarcities multiply. As weather extremes caused by climate change have become a daily part of life, Weik von Mossner takes an incisive look at the not-too-distant future. Daily temperatures have soared, and flooding and wildfires have ravaged regions across the globe. In addition, the weather has disrupted worldwide shipping. At the heart of this thought-provoking novel are two damaged people trying to build a relationship while working at cross purposes to help society amid dealing with a broken system’s inequities. Jake and Shavir are surrounded by friends and colleagues only too happy to point out why they shouldn’t click as a couple. Yet their biggest obstacles are self-doubts and a world that is falling apart. The author has created an engrossing book that holds out hope despite all the mistakes made by humans.
This insightful, engaging SF tale argues that it’s never too late to fix the world.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9783982496917
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Elzwhere Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2022
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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