A heroic cosmic odyssey that—for all the technology—remains textured with the stuff of legend, stirring and ultimately...
A space explorer—investigating a vanished expedition to colonize a faraway world—recalls an epic life filled with adventures, loss, and peril as he faces a potential reunion with a former love.
Debut author Cahill spins a wide-roaming galactic tale with mythic overtones here. The novel’s first-person narrator is big, stout-hearted Oren Siris of a moon mining colony called Verygone. In spacegoing humanity’s far future (or remote past?), Oren belongs to the “Fellowship,” a vast unity of settled worlds—there’s no mention of intelligent alien life—ever pushing outward and exploring, much like the Star Trek franchise’s Federation. In trying to establish an outpost on the promising but remote world of Eaiph, a vanguard of “Architects” has seemingly disappeared—among them is Saiara Tumon Yta, a Fellowship ensign who was Oren’s great love. Because people can live millennia with advanced Fellowship technology and cryonic stasis, Oren hopes to reunite with Saiara, even after 627 years, as his own follow-up ship nears the planet. Meanwhile, the narrative recounts Oren’s earlier space exploits as a rookie cadet facing dangers and wonders, ranging from a derelict starship’s artificial intelligence (aka the “shipheart”) turning malignant to a rococo culture featuring a charming, penniless aristocrat leading visitors through a sort of carnival masquerade drawn from the dominant religion. At last on the semibarbaric Eaiph, Oren encounters old and new threats while trying to remain true to the Fellowship’s idealistic goals and his own dreams. The author’s rich vocabulary weaves spells with hard sci-fi threads blended neatly with loanwords and arcane and antique jargon (“amanuensis,” “pausha,” “biologician”). It is a mixture that sometimes touches the sublime in sci-fi lyricism: “We had reached Eaiph, one of the most fertile worlds ever discovered, a glassy blue cauldron of life, waiting for those to live it. In three more galactic weeks, the little waterstone would arrive to meet us on its passage around Soth Ra.” One can forgive Cahill’s springing the old Nightmare on Elm Street trick a few times too many, as tough spots and cliffhangers turn out to be dreams (yet sometimes, more than dreams). The manner in which the author resolves the strands should pinch the heartstrings of readers accustomed to programmed uplift.
A heroic cosmic odyssey that—for all the technology—remains textured with the stuff of legend, stirring and ultimately melancholy.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973326-65-6
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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