A rollercoaster doomsday tale about a marauding planetoid that mixes implausibility with decent thrills.
In Schaefer’s SF novel, an Earth outpost near Saturn encounters a looming mega-comet, which has had deadly effects on humans for eons.
By the final years of the 21st century, a World Space Council has erected self-sufficient biodome environments containing Earth flora and fauna on the moon, on Mars, and, most recently, on Gaia 3, located on Saturn’s moon Titan. There, scientist Margaret Vandolah faces escalating challenges from an out-of-balance ecosystem, infrastructure glitches, and strange dreams afflicting the super-competent crew. Her teenage son, Will, is more interested in astronomical observation, and he’s the first to note an approaching object circling in from beyond Pluto. The intruding planetoid dwarfs all known comets and is massive enough to exert its own destructive gravitational force. “And it’s outgassing exotic ices.…This is amazing,” observes Will. But the sphere’s fluky radiation, interacting spectacularly with Saturn’s rings, not only produces an unearthly lightshow, but also causes a loss of communication with Earth—plus glaucoma, blindness, and, if untreated, eventual insanity among members of the crew. With the comet-thing on a vector toward their home planet, the Vandolahs and their dwindling population of nonhomicidal crewmembers must somehow warn the Space Council while also trying to save Gaia 3 from annihilation. Schaefer dips into a now-obscure notion that calls to mind politician Ignatius Donnelly’s peculiar volume Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883); its proposition was that cosmic disasters due to space debris have regularly bedeviled humanity, requiring long, hard climbs back up to civilization each time. This Michael Crichton–esque version of that theory features wide-eyed scientific wonder, exciting technological problem-solving, and Hollywood-style action. However, it also delivers mediocre dialogue, a somewhat clinical emotional distance, and outrageous coincidences, as when young Will’s pertinent skillset ranges from engineering to ancient Middle Eastern archaeology. However, there are also some cute and helpful monkeys along the way. A last-act change of venue and new cast members take the yarn into more peculiar territory, as SF verges into pulpy occult fiction.
A rollercoaster doomsday tale about a marauding planetoid that mixes implausibility with decent thrills.Pub Date: April 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798989060856
Page Count: 347
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2025
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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