Elaborately constructed motives, action sequences, and plotting make this book difficult to summarize but a pleasure to read.
The interplanetary political plotting continues in this follow-up to These Burning Stars (2023).
The minority group known as the Jeveni has escaped from the oppressive Kindom government to a secret colony on the planet Capamame. Unfortunately, not all of the new settlers are happy in their hidden sanctuary, a situation exacerbated by a mysterious group of saboteurs vandalizing key infrastructure, murdering prominent people, and hacking into vital systems. In the Treble planetary system, the Kindom require the Jeveni for their expertise in processing sevite, the fuel that powers spaceships. The government is in chaos, due to the abrupt departure of the Jeveni, confusion over who controls the current sevite supply, threats of rebellion, and power struggles among the three parts of the Kindom (the Clerics, the Secretaries, and the Cloaks). Various powerful figures seek the endorsement of Cleric Chono, a popular and genuinely pious person who’s concerned with justice, not politics—a difficult position to maintain in this corrupt and ruthless milieu. Her only (and not necessarily reliable) ally is her secretive former schoolmate Six, currently disguised as Esek Nightfoot, an almost universally despised but well-connected sociopath whom Six murdered and replaced. Can the Jeveni save their colony from invasion by the Kindom or destruction from within? Will the Kindom simply implode before it can take concrete action? This is a middle volume in a trilogy, so these quandaries will not reach resolution just yet. We are simply plunged deeper into an intricate labyrinth of intrigue, where everyone’s motives and even their identity are subject to question. This installment also carries forward the message from the previous book: Do not try to help people without consulting them; it’s likely to blow up in your face (possibly literally). While you’re pursuing your own plan based on what you think they want, they might not be grateful for your efforts and aren’t standing still waiting for you to finish.
Elaborately constructed motives, action sequences, and plotting make this book difficult to summarize but a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780316463522
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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