An agreeable throwback SF adventure romp, full of peril and alluring ladies.
In Roberts’ SF novel, an amnesiac youth recovered from suspended animation becomes pivotal in Earth’s dealings with a rising empire encroaching from deep space.
In 2290 A.D., a spacefaring crew discovers a centuries-old colony vessel bearing evidence of a violent struggle and housing one survivor in a suspended-animation pod. The “young man” (who was actually born long, long ago) is named Jason Alexander Xavis (“Jax”) and possesses seemingly instinctual fighting skills—but no memories. The pragmatic Captain Barnaby adds Jax to his colorful roster as they proceed to their next destination, a branch of the emerging Locorran Empire. The Locorrans are an advanced and helpful (maybe too helpful) society from deep space claiming to be the successful flowering of one of humankind’s early exploration-colonization projects. They get diplomatically cozy with a disadvantaged and outgunned Earth, but there is something ominous about their brain waves. Readers learn that after Earth suffered ruinous war, at least one rogue visionary and his sympathizers fled the partially destroyed planet, perhaps following an alien summons. Is Jax a remnant of that old expedition? Are the Locorrans the descendants? And why is every Locorran who encounters Jax determined to kill him? The plot grows into an escalating series of cliffhanger situations culminating in a rather campy gladiatorial affair, related in the breathless retro-space-opera tradition that escalates the stakes to the fate of the galaxy. Action is parceled out adroitly enough to distract readers from obvious questions and plot holes, and Roberts slips through a few neat twists in the bargain. Occasional gore intrudes upon the fun, but the sexual content remains mostly tame; this is remarkable considering how desirable women fall for the Buck Rogers–like hero at every opportunity: “Everything was perfect about her—her legs, arms, hips, lips, and torso. It was as if she had stepped right out of one of his dreams.” (It is only a minor complication that memory-less Jax does not know whether or not he is a virgin.)
An agreeable throwback SF adventure romp, full of peril and alluring ladies.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798334937925
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2024
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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