A straightforward sci-fi story in an unorthodox but entertaining package.
In Woodward’s (Americanisation, 2011, etc.) sci-fi comedy, a New Orleans couple must prevent aliens from exterminating the human race.
College writing instructor Warren Avon spots what appears to be a “long, black acorn” while walking near his home. It’s actually a tiny spaceship containing Jerry and Phthsspitty-snapp, aliens from the planet Xxzzrrrva. The former is a scientist on his 29th planetary mission, and the latter, an intern on her first voyage. Their probe of Earth, which they call “Grawgraw-3,” is halted when Warren captures their ship, so Jerry initiates communication with the human. As he relates their mission, he takes the opportunity to ask Warren about Earth. Jerry finds out that petroleum is a valuable local fuel, and he’s sure that Xxzzrrrva’s Exploratory Board will destroy humanity to keep them from wasting it. The two aliens, along with Warren and his wife, Penny, devise a plan to stop Jerry’s superior, Councilor Hmmm, from authorizing mankind’s eradication. This isn’t an easy task, especially after Jerry inadvertently blows up an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The group also faces another seemingly impossible task—to somehow convince humans to use alternative fuel sources. Unusually, Woodward structures his entire novel as a “TERMS OF USE” agreement. However, this agreement also includes excerpts from a book (with Warren listed as its author) that advance the more traditional story in a chronological manner. This offbeat approach is frequently hilarious, as when the agreement includes an example of plagiarism that simply changes the characters’ names (“Jerry,” for instance, becomes “Larry”). Surprisingly, though, the agreement’s constant interruptions are never jarring. Although the short novel doesn’t delve deeply into its characters, they are distinctive; for example, Penny suffers from a mysterious ailment that results in conflicting diagnoses. The narrative also often provides memorable descriptions, as when Warren explains fishing boats to Jerry. The Terms of Use are more formal in tone but take comical turns; the agreement discourages loaning the book to others, offering “strategies for deflecting loan requests.”
A straightforward sci-fi story in an unorthodox but entertaining package.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997862-4-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Spaceboy Books LLC
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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