An appealing hero drives this intelligent, labyrinthine SF yarn.
In Gordon’s thriller, a scientist’s plan to save her city via time travel leads to endless complications.
Rebecca Dawn lives and works in New Hope, a city overseen by the United Nations in the Congolese jungle. Thirty years earlier, a meteor fell to Earth there. The meteor was the last piece of a black hole, and dark matter has since supplied power for the citizens of New Hope. It’s a place where one can “bend time”; rejuvenation pods make people young again by essentially isolating time. (“They make a vortex. You know, like water circling in a drain. And when the flow is channeled, it goes inside the chamber and moves backward while passing through the individual’s body.”) Not everyone is happy about New Hope’s lack of independence or the U.N.’s unregulated dark-matter experiments: A man named Richard Conners spearheads the New Independence Movement against U.N. control, which culminates in a calculated attack on Forever Young, the facility where Rebecca works. The result is a time fracture that threatens all of New Hope, including Rebecca’s parents. After Rebecca’s boss and mentor, David Young, shows her a time machine hidden in the lower levels of Forever Young, she gets an idea: She’ll hop into the machine, travel back a few years, and devise a plan for avoiding the present-day tragedy. Once there, she takes one simple albeit shocking course of action, only to return to her present and realize she didn’t quite solve the problem—she’s changed things she didn’t anticipate, in part because the time machine doesn’t function the way she thought it would. If she makes a return trip to the past, will her world become even more mixed up?
Gordon’s intricate story is chock-full of scientific terminology and both modern and futuristic tech: “She carefully navigated the layered menus and fallback triggers, a system unlike any she’d seen before…Legacy code wrapped in failsafe loops. A mechanical shell housing something closer to a temporal operating system than any field-control logic.” Descriptions like this do little to help readers understand the intricacies of dark matter and time travel, a problem exacerbated when David intentionally withholds information from Rebecca. Further complicating matters, while Rebecca travels into the past along a single timeline, the novel ultimately bounces around various other chronologies. Still, a cohesive narrative does play throughout. Even with the many characters involved, readers primarily follow Rebecca’s time-traveling, and it’s clear when she’s in the past. Headers denoting shifts in the narrative perspective provide the year as well as a helpful abbreviation that, while not immediately explained, is something most readers will be able to work out. Relatable details ground the story, including those pertaining to the time machine, a makeshift contraption with “rough welds” and “mismatched panels.” Rebecca is bright and instantly likable; she barely hesitates to put herself in potential danger (in a machine she’s unfamiliar with) once she’s convinced she can somehow save her fellow citizens. The final act comes complete with a startling turn, a thought-provoking revelation, and an unforgettable denouement.
An appealing hero drives this intelligent, labyrinthine SF yarn.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798994868201
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2026
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
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
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