An energetic opener to a comic-book–ish SF series marked by breathless action and cliffhangers.
In this debut SF novel, a farm boy in a time-frozen 1950s America where Earth is declared to be flat realizes the truth of this strange sham world and his key role in it.
Golembiewski’s series opener flirts with Philip K. Dick–style paranoia but primarily harks back to golden age pulp adventure/escapism. In a 1956-inspired contrived existence, James is a husky high school senior in the agrarian town of Eggerton. His young adult life revolves around performing harvest chores; playing baseball; going to see SF movies with his sweetheart, Carol; and anticipating college. James doesn’t initially question the school-taught dogma that Earth is flat or that a taboo, 400-foot wall west of his family’s farm marks its boundary. Approaching the wall or indulging in any anti-social behavior results in unconsciousness (aka being “switched off”). But when an odd meteor shower tears open a field, divulging a gleaming metal subsurface beneath the sod, even James has to admit something is peculiar. Locating an access doorway and settling into an awaiting automated spaceship, James is immediately zoomed to “New Atlantis,” a fabulous city-state in the hollowed-out moon. There, an enticing, gorgeous action girl named Ariel immediately plunges him into shootouts with robots and hairbreadth escapes. It seems the year really is 4040 and the dying Earth was sectioned into a multifaceted construct where the surviving populace has been genetically engineered and implanted to be docile drones. They provide food and material for the moon-dwelling “TK,” humanity’s callous, technocratic masters. James, alias “J.,” is an elite descendant of the TK. He was sent incognito to the Smallville-type community in a labyrinthine scheme to liberate and save what’s left of humankind before the TK heartlessly abandon and doom the home world. There are seemingly countless chases down corridors, innumerable trashed enemy robots, plenty of weapons fire, and lots of supporting characters introduced with such rapidity that they scarcely register (except on a scorecard) when some turn out to be devious traitors. In short, it's breezy fun writ large, with impressive scale to its imaginings but pure bubble gum in its core rather than molten iron/nickel. Readers of a certain age may remember when bubble gum traditionally came in a flat package.
An energetic opener to a comic-book–ish SF series marked by breathless action and cliffhangers. (acknowledgments, author bio)Pub Date: May 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73488-750-1
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Baba Jaga Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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
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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