A compelling SF survival saga in which humans turn out to be the prime threat.
Human space colonization is disrupted by bizarre invaders and forces from an outside dimension in Gillespie’s SF novel.
This second volume in the author’s Riders of the Stars universe is a grim adventure set in the same dysfunctional star system as the opening installment’s Atom Bomb Baby (2023). Serenity Orbital is the ironically named vast space-station array circling the colonized planet Arcadia in a future in which humans—thanks to technological gifts from aliens—have spread throughout the galaxy. The Kraal, tentacled, incomprehensible horrors apparently from another dimension, have launched a devastating attack; attempts to repel them with nuclear weapons has only made things worse, creating "void storms" that emit mutant creatures. Luckless human victims of the invaders become living-dead “growlers,” mindless and hostile decaying things. Diego Alvarez is an adolescent boy among the survivors subsisting on a now-isolated Serenity Orbital, a remnant of civilization that has degraded into a religious dictatorship. Because Diego suffers growler-like facial scars and possesses paranormal powers, he is much bullied and feared. After Diego’s parents are killed in a Kraal attack, corrupt prophet Carlos exiles the boy to the dreaded lower-deck rings, which are overrun with growlers and other void mutants. Diego survives on his own for a year before he gets some human company—kids he knew from Serenity who have been forced into the terror zones by Carlos as a “rite of passage.” One need not be familiar with Atom Bomb Baby to appreciate this story, which owes much to William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies (1954) as jealousy, treachery, and toxic machismo subvert the banished youths’ would-be brotherhood. Readers of zombie fiction will dig the ghoulish growlers, who shamble through a George Romero-like consumerist environment of defunct retail spaces and are not undeserving of some sympathy. Not much is learned about the Kraal, but followers of Japanese anime will recognize the trope of enigmatic alien hostiles who pop out of nowhere at the convenience of the plot.
A compelling SF survival saga in which humans turn out to be the prime threat.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780998749969
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Revenant Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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