An often dense story with a refreshingly unique hero.
An SF adventure novel set in a land of dreams.
Hofsetz follows up his SF novel Challenges of the Gods (2019) with this second installment, which sees protagonist Zeon in his second year in prison on Jora. Zeon hails from that planet, which is very similar to Earth, although his sentence is carried out in a place that brings to mind a desert island more than someplace like Alcatraz. One day, he receives a visit from Dooria, the vice governor of the Atlantic Alliance. She wants to send Zeon to Pangea, a place “where our consciousness goes when we’re asleep, while our bodies stay behind,” as Zeon describes it. As it turns out, Zeon is an angel who’s meant to protect Pangea, where a war between gods is raging. Zeon is initially hesitant to help, but he receives a personal message from Jane, whom he knows well, which convinces him that the mission is worthwhile. The pages that follow offer all sorts of SF wildness involving parallel universes, wacky outfits, a “bug general,” and loads of action involving hyperspheres—“holographic environments inside Pangea, created by the messengers of the gods.” From the outset, the narrative is as complex as it is ambitious. Readers learn much about Pangea and the rules that govern a place so fantastical and dangerous. Although a plethora of characters march through the story, the focus remains on quirky Zeon, who’s hardly a stereotypical action hero: He doesn’t care for killing, he likes his alcohol sweet, and his idea of great sexual activity involves tickling. In a world that’s dense with rules and conflict, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is, in other words, a welcome change from the average laser-blasting SF–action protagonist. Following his journey isn’t always easy, but it never fails to entertain.
An often dense story with a refreshingly unique hero.Pub Date: March 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951832-00-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Chracatoa Press
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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