A worthy sequel with a motley band of intriguing human and alien characters.
In this second installment of an SF series, humans and aliens try to rescue thousands of abducted earthlings.
In his last adventure, travel agent Timothy met Jed, an investigator who regularly travels across the universe. After the two teamed up to thwart intergalactic human trafficking, Timothy was ready to return to his Earth job. But as numerous earthlings are still missing, Jed’s brother, Napoleon, asks for Timothy’s assistance in finding the kidnapped humans. Viola, the dominant female at an intergalactic station, needs Timothy’s help as well: She’s worried about five youngsters, including an infant, whose safe travel she’s paid someone to ensure. Meanwhile, four Australian physicists at a symposium in Chile are among the abducted humans on their way to the other side of the universe. Humans are a “valuable commodity” who, most likely, become slaves on other planets. But it’s soon clear that the kidnappers may be planning something much worse for the earthlings they’ve captured. Timothy and Napoleon hope to reunite with Jed, who’s out on his own tracking the abductees. And they have a chance at succeeding, thanks to the handful of allies they’ve amassed. While this series’ first volume centered on Timothy and Jed, Book 2 highlights new and returning players to great effect. The story opens with a character named Capt. Kandley, whose young human prisoner helps her survive a snowy planet—a scene that pays off at the end. The abundant players and subplots fuel the narrative’s steady momentum and ultimately intersect with a few surprises. Along with scientific elements (like a menacing black hole), there are indelible genre moments, from betrayals to a character’s newfound compassion. Although Years recaps quite a bit of the preceding installment, readers may want to peruse that novel first.
A worthy sequel with a motley band of intriguing human and alien characters. (author bio)Pub Date: May 14, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.
“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream- and rust-colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446591
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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