A heartening exploration of outer space and a teen’s true self.
In this sci-fi debut, a young person comes of age aboard a planet-hopping cargo ship.
Alfie Dale, a legendary glassmaker is a settler on the distant planet of Outer-23 in the settlement zone of Gutshot. There, men “own the stores, run the bars and lead the settlement,” while women “gave birth to more men, or died in the whorehouse trying.” Problems are solved as they were in the old American West—by dueling. One day, Alfie’s 14-year-old daughter, Arisa, throws dust bombs back and forth with her friend Nate Jennings. When she accidentally hits wanted man Wild Clyde Wallace, he mistakes Arisa for a boy, due to her short hair and scrawny frame, and attempts to kill her. After Alfie successfully saves his daughter’s life, Wild Clyde’s brother, Munroe, shows up for revenge. Alfie hides Arisa on the Calypso, a cargo ship with a tightknit, friendly crew that travels among the well-off “Inner” and frontierlike “Outer” worlds. Accepted by the veteran shipmates, including Lucas, Kelle, and Safia, Arisa starts a new life, taking the name “Ari.” She’s always been more comfortable dressing like a boy, and she does her best to “pass” as a young man while gathering details about other people who look like her, with “tea-colored” skin and uncommonly shaped eyes. In this series starter, Thomas offers a coming-of-age tale that isn’t held back by standard tropes of space-based adventure. The plot proceeds episodically—sometimes with gory violence—and Ari ages in fits and starts. Ari, as someone grappling with gender issues, is a welcome character in the sci-fi genre. Along the way, she grows closer to both Safia and Lucas, the latter of whom eventually reveals that he knows that Ari was born female, saying, “I’ve never, in all my time on Calypso, ever come across a man with a smile as amazing as yours.” Safia, who’s gay, comforts Ari with the statement: “You’re not pretending....You’re living. Never think otherwise.” Other key moments in the novel include Ari’s first sight of an ocean and the introduction of Laila, a companion who helps Ari walk confidently as a man.
A heartening exploration of outer space and a teen’s true self.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5348-3379-1
Page Count: 152
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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