This outsized so-called classic should have stayed in the past.
In this newly translated 1990 book from de Rojas, one of Cuba’s pre-eminent sci-fi writers, sleeper agents emerge from the past to wrest control of the future.
Two hundred years after the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, two tiny robots awaken underground and burrow to the surface. When 9-year-old Bennie touches one of the robots, it wipes out his personality and memories and replaces them with those of Thomas Babson, a sadistic Empire torturer who lived hundreds of years ago. Now awakened in the future, Babson injects agents’ identities into unsuspecting others. Bennie’s mother becomes Candy, a veteran spy, while psychosociologist Harry becomes Stephen, a man with desires so peculiar (though never described) that he reprograms women’s minds to suit his perverse needs. When Aisha arrives for an appointment with Harry, he hypnotizes her, and she awakens with the personality of Alice—plus Stephen’s additional, depraved sexual programming. Unbeknownst to the agents, Alice is also a spy for the Communists. She escapes from Stephen and the others and eventually teams up with Maya, a “cybo,” whose cybernetic implants have left her emotionless. Together, they forge a plan to take down the newly awakened operatives. Along the way, this bloated story crams in every moth-eaten sci-fi cliché readers can think of—romantic love is aberrant behavior, artificial intelligence gains sentience, people abandon technology to become “primitives”—and limps through them with zero urgency. The female characters are also depressingly retrograde; for example, Alice doesn’t seem to care that her sexual agency was brainwashed away and spends much of her time shrieking about her “love” for Stephen, often while naked or at least topless. Indeed, de Rojas describes virtually every female character’s bare breasts at least once: small breasts, pert breasts, prominent breasts—this book’s got more boobs than a Porky’s film. Meanwhile, the worldbuilding is glutted with details, with tiresome infodumps that go on for pages. Characters drift in and out of the story even as new players keep appearing. With everyone changing names and bodies, keeping track of who’s who becomes a chore.
This outsized so-called classic should have stayed in the past.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-632-06051-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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