First collaboration from SF grandmaster Clarke (3001: The Final Odyssey, etc.) and Kube-McDowell (The Quiet Pools, 1990). Physicist Jeffrey Horton tests what he hopes is an antigravity device, but instead his machine generates a field that detonates nitrate-based fuels and explosives! Horton and his boss, Karl Brohier, take their Trigger to President Mark Breland. Breland’s dilemma: bury the notion—and risk someone else discovering it? Keep it exclusively for the US—but for how long? Or inform the world? What follows, though punctuated by dramatic illustrations, is largely a prolonged debate between enlightened peaceniks and old-style military mind-sets, armaments and gun lobbies, armed hate groups, and organized crime, demonstrating that what’s invented cannot be uninvented. Fur and lawsuits fly. At last Horton and Brohier make a theory breakthrough: matter is composed of energy inside an information envelope, and the Trigger alters that information. (This, unfortunately, is as persuasive as it gets.) The military contemplate using nukes in their all-out efforts to negate the Trigger effect. Horton resigns in disgust and disappears. Brohier invents the Jammer, a significant upgrade. An evil reactionary assassinates a pro-Trigger senator on live TV. Nevertheless, crime continues to fall, while Americans develop a sense of community. Finally, crazy backwoods militiamen grab the reclusive Horton and torture him to reveal the supposed secrets behind what they regard as conspiracies and tricks. Heavy, preachy, and only intermittently absorbing: the authors get their message across, but it’s about as subtle as a plummeting piano.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10458-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and...
The debut novel from Australian actor Arnold is a fusion of paranormal fantasy and mystery set in a world where magic has been effectively destroyed by humans, forcing the supernatural population to live a radically diminished existence.
Fetch Phillips is a “Man for Hire,” which is another way of saying the down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking former Soldier–turned-detective will do just about anything to pay the bills. When a principal from a cross-species school enlists him to find a missing professor—a 300-year-old Vampire named Edmund Rye—Phillips quickly agrees. Without magic, the Vampires—and all other supernatural beings—are slowly dying. So how difficult could it be to find a withered bloodsucker who is so weak he can hardly move around? After visiting Rye’s last residence—a secluded loft space in the local library filled with the Vampire’s research and writings—Phillips discovers that one of Rye’s students is missing as well: a young Siren named January. His investigation becomes complicated when more Vampires turn up dead and he is almost killed himself. While the mystery element of the storyline is a bit thin, the focus on meticulous worldbuilding and highly detailed backstory as well as the cast of fully developed and memorable characters (Simms, the reptilian cop; Peteris, the disfigured half-werewolf; etc.) are unarguable strengths. But the real power here is in Arnold’s use of imagery throughout. His unconventional descriptive style brings a richness and depth to the narrative. Pete’s smile is “like a handbag with a broken zipper,” and the sound of Phillips’ falling from a building is “like someone stepping on an egg full of snails.”
The first installment of an effortlessly readable series that could be the illegitimate love child of Terry Pratchett and Dashiell Hammett.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45582-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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