Not the best entry in this long and uneven series, but regulars won’t want to give up the habit now.
Sequel to New Earth (2013), in which humans explored a planet orbiting the star Sirius that turned out to be inhabited. By human-aliens.
After a voyage lasting 80 years, diplomat Jordan Kell and his team reached New Earth to learn that the world was built by machine intelligences known as the Predecessors and populated by them with a human species created from Earth DNA. With their advanced science, the Predecessors learned of a vast explosion in the galactic core that has caused a lethal sphere of gamma radiation to expand through the galaxy, killing all life it touches. Jordan and his New Earther wife, Aditi, returned in cryogenic suspension to Earth. Though the Death Wave won’t reach Earth for 2,000 years and New Earth scientists have developed shields against it, many other intelligent but pre-technological species won’t survive—unless Jordan and Aditi can persuade the World Council to build starships and go help them. Unfortunately, Anita Halleck, the ruthless and more-or-less immortal Council chair, dreams of controlling all the far-flung, independent-minded settlements scattered throughout the solar system and ruling them forever. If Jordan swings public opinion to his side, Halleck’s imperial ambitions will be finished. So, she reasons, she must find a way to shut the star travelers up. Permanently. Most of the book, then, details the twists and turns of a political battle that’s several surprises short of intriguing and conducted in slow motion with rubber knives. Bova supplies sufficient fresh detail to keep things from going catatonic, but the jury’s still out on whether he’s showing us a human society that’s finally beginning to mature or one that’s yawning and stretching before bedtime.
Not the best entry in this long and uneven series, but regulars won’t want to give up the habit now.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7950-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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