The whole impressive enterprise roars and rattles along, thrilling, relentless, gripping, and utterly improbable: pure...
Final part of Clark’s (Forgotten Worlds, 2017, etc.) The Silence, a widescreen, all-action military/space opera trilogy in which giant alien jellyfish called the Blue-Blue-White threaten to exterminate all sentient life in the galaxy.
Last time out, a small detachment of ships commanded by 300-year-old invincible ex-Navy pilot Aleister Lanoe encountered the Choir, a tiny remnant of an alien civilization that has survived, but only just, repeated attacks by Blue-Blue-White robot drones. The Choir can open up space-time wormholes, so Lanoe demands to be sent to the Blue-Blue-White’s home system—not that he cares about the existential threat; he just wants revenge. The Choir duly oblige. Unfortunately, a squadron of ships dispatched by hostile interstellar megacorporation Centrocor slips into the wormhole in pursuit. At the far end, there’s no sign of the Blue-Blue-White, so Lanoe’s first order of business will be to defeat the superior Centrocor fleet. No problem, right? However, it turns out that the Choir not only sent them thousands of light-years across space, but half a billion years into the past! True to form, the pace picks up on the first page and never slackens as our heroes face overwhelming odds—remember the old “Space Invaders” games?—and sustain crippling damage. Favorite characters from the previous books pop up, of course, doing what they do best: artificial intelligence Tannis Valk has the useful ability to copy and install himself in ships and space suits; annoying traitor Auster Maggs continues his oleaginous wiles; and straight-shooting executive officer Marjoram Candless wonders if Lanoe’s going totally bananas. Major new plot wrinkles (the time travel thing in particular) plus fresh menaces (alien reinforcements, mutinies, mad hallucinations) on every page avert any danger of predictability.
The whole impressive enterprise roars and rattles along, thrilling, relentless, gripping, and utterly improbable: pure delight for fans.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35581-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Even though the cracks are beginning to show, and the sheer narrative power of the superb original series is lacking, Dune...
Third in the Dune prequel series from originator Frank Herbert's son Brian and collaborator Anderson (Dune: House Atreides, 1999, and Dune: House Harkonnen, 2000). Duke Leto Atreides plans to attack planet Ix and drive out the occupying genetic-whiz Tleilaxu, while his concubine Jessica must travel to the imperial capital, Kaitain, to give birth to her child—not the daughter she was ordered to bear by her Bene Gesserit superiors. The Emperor Shaddam grows crueler and less restrained as his conspiracy with the Tleilaxu to develop a synthetic substitute for the miraculous spice “melange” advances. Shaddam's coconspirator Ajidica, the Tleilaxu Master, has tested “amal” on himself and obtained a superhuman brain boost; better still, the imperial Sardaukar troops stationed on Ix are already addicted to amal, so that now they'll obey him rather than the Emperor. The Emperor's agent, Hasimir Fenring, isn't convinced that amal will be an effective substitute for melange and demands more tests. Regardless, Shaddam squeezes the Great Families to reveal their secret spice stockpiles; once equipped with amal, he can destroy planet Arrakis—the sole source of the natural spice—and hold the galaxy to ransom. The plot heads for one of those black-comic moments where everybody's holding a gun to somebody else's head.
Even though the cracks are beginning to show, and the sheer narrative power of the superb original series is lacking, Dune in any guise is as addictive as the spice itself.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-553-11084-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of...
What if the only way to save humanity was to lose almost everyone?
This was kind of inevitable: Wendig (Vultures, 2019, etc.) wrestles with a magnum opus that grapples with culture, science, faith, and our collective anxiety while delivering an epic equal to Steven King’s The Stand (1978). While it’s not advertised as an entry in Wendig’s horrifying Future Proof universe that includes Zer0es (2015) and Invasive (2016), it’s the spiritual next step in the author’s deconstruction of not only our culture, but the awful things that we—humanity—are capable of delivering with our current technology and terrible will. The setup is vividly cinematic: After a comet passes near Earth, a sleeping sickness takes hold, causing victims to start wandering in the same direction, barring those who spontaneously, um, explode. Simultaneously, a government-built, wickedly terrifying AI called Black Swan tells its minders that a disgraced scientist named Benji Ray might be the key to solving the mystery illness. Wendig breaks out a huge cast that includes Benji’s boss, Sadie Emeka; a rock star who’s a nod to King’s Springsteen-esque Larry Underwood; a pair of sisters—one of whom is part of the “herd” of sleepwalkers and one who identifies as a “shepherd” tending to the sick; and Matthew Bird, who leads the faithful at God’s Light Church and who struggles with a world in which technology itself can become either God or the devil incarnate. Anyone who’s touched on Wendig’s oeuvre, let alone his lively social media presence, knows he’s a full-voiced political creature who’s less concerned with left and right than the chasm between right and wrong, and that impulse is fully on display here. Parsing the plot isn’t really critical—Wendig has stretched his considerable talents beyond the hyperkinetic horror that is his wheelhouse to deliver a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together.
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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