After a strong opening, this gamer-oriented adventure increasingly resembles its first-person-shooter inspirations.
A disgraced security operative in the space-going 22nd century finds a new calling as a gladiator-style warrior in Sugralinov’s SF novel.
Carter Riley is hired to provide security for a corporate-backed Mars expedition that expects big things from an astounding find: a cube-shaped container of nonhuman origin, left on the red planet by an ancient, unknown civilization dubbed the “Precursors.” But the scientists ignore Riley’s warnings to not recklessly meddle with the relic, and some nasty things get unleashed that literally tear the expedition apart. Quick shooting and mech armor (barely effective under the circumstances) leave a mangled Carter the only one alive, rendered comatose for long months. In dreams, he receives a mysterious message: “The first of his kind shall be rewarded...” By the time unsympathetic authorities have revived Carter (with the cheapest possible replacement for his missing arm) and scapegoat him for the deaths, the artifact has been decoded and has absolutely transformed humanity. It seems that the unseen Precursors established a vast space-station array (called Sidus) in the center of the Milky Way galaxy; here, civilizations worthy enough to translate their glyphs and technology can send representatives to mingle and share culture in a regulated, no-danger/no-fatalities environment. Curiously, however, this society revolves around ritual combat in gladiatorial-style games, where force-fields and other super-science measures ensure that everyone survives even the most vicious bouts. Combatants, successful or not, accrue points and new abilities and modifications; others profit from viewership and fight promotion. Carter, a near-unemployable outcast on Earth, divorced by his faithless wife, somehow knows that, as the “first of his kind” to encounter Precursor consciousness personally, his destiny must somehow lead him to Sidus. An attempt to get there via space-mining scut work gets him aboard a transport that is hijacked by space pirates—in the process, however, Carter assembles a core team of fellow desperate types, setting the stage for unexpected adventures.
The author, launching a series with this volume, is established in the realm of online-gamer-oriented SF called “litRPG”—the genre’s most famous exponent is Ernest Cline (Ready Player One, 2011). Sugralinov has an assured voice, in the manner of Alan Dean Foster or even Robert Heinlein; the early pages introducing the much-abused, tough-but-ethical protagonist portend a potentially darker and more serious narrative before thrusting the ensemble (which includes a skirmish-ready pet hamster) into the arenas and weapons shops of the Sidus gamer-heaven environment. But once the characters are ensconced in Sidus, the plot focuses more on ranking battle statistics, insider tips, and the storytelling equivalent of cheat codes (“The Raptorians’ wave modulators emitted a barely perceptible, but rapidly growing hum a second before they fired. Knowing that, I could tumble sharply to one side by reflex, dodging the shot.”) The sexual material is mild (PG-13 at its spiciest), and the violence is cartoonish. The target audience should enjoy the result, even if the story doesn’t end so much as it just comes to a stop, promising a sequel.
After a strong opening, this gamer-oriented adventure increasingly resembles its first-person-shooter inspirations.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9788076931794
Page Count: 502
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2023
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
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.
“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream- and rust-colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446591
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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