Unambitious time-travel SF that doesn’t push many boundaries—except those of the Macedonian Empire.
A student and his professor stumble across the secret of time travel and journey back to the era of Alexander the Great to try to rewrite history.
In 2026, American college student Derek assists professor Kibble with a high-speed spinning gizmo for processing honey and inadvertently discovers the secret to moving backward in time. Soon the pair have a unit that’s large enough to accommodate passengers and can be carried on a helicopter. Things are looking dire on the geopolitical scene, as a nuclear war looms involving Iran, Russia, China, and Western democracies. Derek and Kibble decide to rewrite history and create a unified, pro-freedom European superpower in the past to align with the United States. The key, determines Kibble, is Alexander the Great, who died at the age of 32 of a fluke illness in 323 B.C.E. after conquering and uniting much of the known world—which all came undone without him. Along with researcher Lex, the team travels to ancient Macedonia and explains everything to a sympathetic Alexander (who improbably takes the existence of time travelers in stride). He minds his health and uses the helicopter and guns imported from 2026 to firm up his empire and survive. But when the Americans return to the future, they find a dystopian police state. With more trips, including one back to the North American continent of 60,000 B.C.E., can the heroes do a reset good enough to make truth, justice, and the American way prevail? In Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder,” a careless time traveler steps on a butterfly eons ago and completely changes Earth’s history; Busby, who previously wrote Lost in Time: Trapped in a Prehistoric World (2019), has his characters in this SF adventure practically stomp metaphorical butterflies beneath their feet. For a while, it seems as if readers will get a darker tale akin to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven, in which repeated godlike meddling makes reality more twisted and worse, but ultimately this is a utopian fantasy. However, it’s one that’s hampered by simplistic language and dialogue (“What I say around here goes. My word is the law!”), broad-brush characterizations, and naïve science.
Unambitious time-travel SF that doesn’t push many boundaries—except those of the Macedonian Empire.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79605-754-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Xlibris Corp
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Curiously compelling but not entirely satisfying.
The fourth and final volume in the Terra Ignota series, a science fantasy set on a 25th-century Earth where people affiliate by philosophy and interest instead of geography.
For the first time in centuries, the world is seized by war—once the combatants actually figure out how to fight one. While rivalries among the Hives provide several motives for conflict, primary among them is whether J.E.D.D. Mason, the heir to various political powers and apparently a god from another universe in human form, should assume absolute rule over the world and transform it for the better. Gathering any large group to further the progress of the war or the possibility for peace is hampered by the loss of the world transit system of flying cars and the global communications network, both shut down by parties unknown, indicating a hidden and dangerous faction manipulating the situation for its own ends. As events play out, they bear a strong resemblance to aspects of the Iliad and the Odyssey, suggesting the persistent influence of Bridger, a deceased child who was also probably a god. Is tragedy inevitable, or can the characters defy their apparent fates? This often intriguing but decidedly peculiar chimera of a story seems to have been a philosophical experiment, but it’s difficult to determine just what was being tested. The worldbuilding—part science, part magic—doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny, and the political structure defies comprehension. The global government consists of an oligarchy of people deeply and intimately connected by love and hate on a scale which surpasses the royal dynasties of old, and it includes convicted felons among their number. Perhaps the characters are intended as an outsized satiric comment on the way politicians embrace expediency over morality or personal feelings, but these supposedly morally advanced potentates commit so many perverse atrocities against one another it is difficult to engage with them as people. At times, they seem nearly as alien as J.E.D.D. Mason.
Curiously compelling but not entirely satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7806-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.
In the not-too-distant future, a marine biologist specializing in cephalopod intelligence discovers a species of octopus with astonishing language skills—research that a giant corporation wants to monetize.
Dr. Ha Nguyen is so amazed by her findings that she's willing to submit herself to the odious tactics of the big tech company, which controls the Vietnamese island where the octopuses dwell. Having "resettled" the population of the Con Dao Archipelago, the company not only will kill any outsiders who attempt to set foot there, but also has ordered Ha's death should she attempt to leave. Not that she has any inclination to do so. Once exposed to the octopuses, she is determined to uncover the great mysteries of extrahuman intelligence. In spite of their hostile reputation, these are creatures of transcendent beauty, communicating through glowing visual symbols that move on their skin in complex patterns and sequences. In a world of robot-operated slave ships, bee-size drones, and AI automonks with three-fingered hands and light receptors for pupils, her main ally is Evrim, the world's first and possibly last true android, which not only thinks like a human being, but also believes it is conscious. Ha's benefactor and adversary is Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, the Icelandic brains of the corporation, whose ultimate goal is to create a mind "wiped clean of its limitations." A prolific writer of SF stories making his debut as a novelist, Nayler maintains a cool, cerebral tone that matches up with the story's eerie underpinnings. Less an SF adventure than a meditation on consciousness and self-awareness, the limitations of human language, and the reasons for those limitations, the novel teaches as it engages.
An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60595-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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