First hardcover volume of three, each holding two Titus Crow novels from Lumley's earlier days as an H.P. Lovecraft disciple. Lumley is best-known for his Harry Keogh Necroscope vampire cycle (Necroscope: Resurgence Vol.II, The Lost Years, p. 1178, etc.). The two ``adventure-horror'' novels in the present book, The Burrowers Beneath and The Transition of Titus Crow, were written back in 1974 and 1975, when fantastic elaboration and great arabesques of description spooled out like bolts of paisley were more highly prized than they are today. Lumley borrows wholesale from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, going into greater anthropological detail than the master cared to on those indescribable protoplasmic horrors with tentacled faces, the underground spawn of the gray, milelong mass of evil called Cthulhu, who swims ``into the deeper magma, against strange tides of molten-rock oceans, those oceans which hold these lily pads we call continents afloat!'' Cthulhu's children build nests, slowly multiply, and are given such names as Yibb-Tsill, Yog-Sothoth, Ithaqua, Hastur, and Lloigor. In The Burrowers Beneath, Titus Crow and Henri de Marigny join forces with a secret group pledged to fight the subterranean monsters. The telepathic creatures, it turns out, fear radiation and water, so Titus, Henri, and their comrades devise some ingenious ways to use these elements against them. At novel's end, Crow and Marigny tumble into a time-machine. In Transition, they return ten years later, looking hardly a day older. In fact, a robot culture in time-space has rebuilt Titus, turning him into a synthetic man in a considerably improved version of a human body. Transition follows Titus's adventures in time, ranging from his tour of Earth's earliest days to his trip forward to the end of time, and including his visit to Elysia, the home of the Elder Gods who were responsible for imprisoning the evil Cthulhu underground. Hideous mobile sludge, hellish dreams, babbling madness, the horror, the horror!
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86299-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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