A dystopian novel of epic proportions that’s imaginative but unnecessarily protracted.
A small group in New England survives a cataclysmic event tied to a destructive cult and battles for survival in Dering’s SF series thriller.
In the near future, U.S. Army Gen. Eric Hyland is aboard a Utopia Project ship in the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic, where he’s being forced by an extreme group called “elders” to work on a project that could destroy all of humanity. A program to condition children for a utopian future society has gone very wrong, so the elders now plan to exterminate humanity with neutron beam attacks. Only those aboard the Utopia ships will survive, as will some designated wildlife areas, so Eric is trying to surreptitiously find ways to save his friends and family by carving out other areas to escape the onslaught. The Elders grow suspicious, but Eric manages to pull it off, and his parents, daughter, and some others survive, relatively unscathed. His mother, however, needs a lifesaving drug, and his daughter Sara’s boyfriend is tasked with gathering a supply and driving it to Vermont. Through all the confusion and the destruction, Eric wants nothing more than to escape the ship and join his family, but when the elders take Sara captive, he must rescue her, get off the ship, and get ready for an inevitable showdown. Dering’s dystopian novel, the second in a trilogy, tackles a monumental disaster in a convincing manner by emphasizing the protagonist’s technical know-how, his close relations, and locations that readers will find familiar. The evil scheme is described in chilling detail and the work includes crucial references to the previous installment of the series. The action scenes, battles, and betrayals work well as a cat-and-mouse game, but on the whole, the book feels overly lengthy. The events of the ninth and 11th days after the cataclysm, in particular, go on for an awfully long time, undercutting the narrative tension.
A dystopian novel of epic proportions that’s imaginative but unnecessarily protracted.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73549-293-3
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Pinewald Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2022
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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