This tragicomic SF tale offers a wry view of narcissistic leaders and their unquestioning followers.
Fleeing an unfriendly Earth, the supporters of a space-travel genius colonize a faraway planet, but centuries later, the inhabitants suffer the consequences of the man’s choices and the cult surrounding his ruling-class descendants.
White’s debut is a partly satirical SF novel with roots in 2155. That is when Nugent Graham, an entrepreneur and inventor of a revolutionary, faster-than-light propulsion engine, bolted from a future Earth under a one-world-government “Single Sovereign.” The backstory details (admittedly fuzzy) include that Graham did not want to yield his engineering secrets to the autocratic Sovereign and led a semisuccessful attempt to abscond with his followers in three great starships to a distant, hot, but habitable planet. The new world was grandiosely dubbed Graham’s Planet, and 253 years later, the settlement is functional but faintly ridiculous in its social structure. Only one ship arrived; another became lost in space; and a third remained a grounded Earth captive. Graham died mysteriously en route, and his son and heir was assassinated. Readers learn that Graham was no champion of freedom but a would-be monarch who intended a world where his family would reign as hereditary, absolute rulers. Minus a full-blooded Graham on Graham’s Planet, political power now falls to any relative by marriage or association. An “Opposition” party gives the appearance of a democracy, but the highest office is held, typically, by the latest relation—now, the petty, spoiled Jordan Graham. When local scientists belatedly activate the old ship-to-ship communication system, they find that the missing spacecraft and its wretched, surviving colonists remain in recoverable orbit while something on Earth seems to have gone horribly wrong. Jordan worries that hitherto undiscovered Grahams will arrive and rival his power, but a larger menace soon looms. Though low on action—and its sketchy science only exists enough to satisfy the plot—White’s sardonic series opener delivers a quick-footed tale whose twists will catch many readers by surprise. With the story’s strong emphasis on characterization, even Jordan ends up more a pitiable figure than an outright villain. The vivid sense of a dysfunctional government regime built on nepotism and entitlement during an era of chronic scarcity and epidemics may hit closer to home than this saga’s fictitious star system.
This tragicomic SF tale offers a wry view of narcissistic leaders and their unquestioning followers.Pub Date: July 21, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-84191-977-3
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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