A long-winded but compelling comic adventure.
A hard-SF story about a multispecies spaceship.
Freeman’s novel centers on the LunaCola H2Liftship and her diverse crew. H2L crafts are powered by hydrogen balloons, rockets, and enormous solar sails, and when readers meet the LunaCola, she’s on a run to Earth from the moon with a minimal crew. That includes the captain, Grace, who’s old-school: “she was not the ‘ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum’ type, but still could squeeze everything out the sails, and sometimes the crew.” There’s the first mate, an octopus who has no name that his crew mates can understand (“ripples of red and ochre moved up and down his body, as if guiding the ship along its path through the cosmos”). And foremost in the narrative are the ship’s other crew members: an orangutan named Tang and a dog named Jack, both genetically engineered for higher cognition and speech. As the narrative unfolds, readers follow Jack and Tang on their Earth adventures; Tang is an enthusiastic gambler and has long dreamed of playing at his personal mecca, Las Vegas. Freeman describes his four crewbeings’ time on Earth and then moves the plot outward, following the H2Liftship on its customary routes from terra firma out to the asteroid belt and back, ferrying goods and raw materials—a familiar SF premise that calls to mind James S.A. Corey’s popular Expanse novels, and one that Freeman exploits with verve and maximum readability. Early on, he tells his readers “the story is a wrapper for the addendum, sometimes it works that way”—but it’s rare that it does so in a novel that’s worth reading. Fortunately, his worldbuilding is energetic and intriguing enough to keep readers turning pages. Along the way, Freeman lays on exposition in layers that are almost, but not quite, heavy enough to crush the dramatic momentum. By contrast, Tang and Jack feel somewhat underdeveloped, but the exotic details of their world overcome that obstacle, as well.
A long-winded but compelling comic adventure.Pub Date: March 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-456237-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2021
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 cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.
After purchasing a dilapidated, century-old starship called the Destitute, Torian Razner discovers that the moss covering it is, in fact, a deeply sarcastic sentient computer with abandonment issues.
Torian’s sister, Celise, is dying. Determined to save her life by getting her to a distant planet with air she can breathe, Torian ignores her former captain Amelia Perrosk’s warning that it’s an impossible task (along with any romantic feelings she might have for Amelia). Using the only ionite bars she has to her name, Torian purchases an ancient, moss-covered alien starship that appears to be on its last legs, so to speak. She hardly expected the moss to be a sentient computer or for it to hold a century-old grudge against its former alien captain. Moss quickly proves itself to be acerbic, intelligent, and rightly angry after being having been left behind for 100 years by its former captain. The two form a reluctant and surprising alliance, Torian proving to Moss that not all captains are “dog-turd fungus,” and they both gradually evolve into the best versions of themselves, human or otherwise. It’s obvious from the early pages that Thorne has crafted a story tailored to fans of Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Falling somewhere between the two, this is a delightful mashup of romance, found family, and a touch of violence as Moss grapples with its feelings about its former captain and the unexpected kindness that Torian shows. Sweet without being overly saccharine, it’s a book for readers who want the adventure that comes with the vastness of outer space without its harsher realities.
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414144
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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