Wonderfully detailed worlds propel these enthralling stories.
Paxson’s collection of SF and speculative fiction short stories ranges from the unsettling and humorous to the outright bizarre.
In this book’s opening tale, “Here Our Steps Faltered,” Ali belongs to a group of online roleplayers. The internet allows them to play as different people throughout various places on Earth, but for Ali, there’s soon a blurring of his flesh-and-blood existence and the virtual world. Many of the tales herein likewise unfold in other worlds, in dystopian futures or on other planets entirely. The author, who breaks these stories into categories, sets five of them in an underground city on the planet Tarnus, including the novella-length “Lejina’s Song.” This tale finds Lejina, in desperate need of medicine for her father, agreeing to double for a popular local singer, Winjilles Thringe. At first, she’s simply posing to pass herself off as the performer. When Thringe is injured, however, Lejina’s continued portrayal gets her closer to the singer’s band members and more entangled in whatever shady things Thringe may have been doing. Other categories include stories set on the planet Mudball and in a near-future New York “where the law didn’t work anymore.” In the former section, three species (gorgons, crocodilians, and humans) more or less learn to co-exist; in the latter, the Pure Sons of God deliver their own justice by shooting people who won’t work for them—or who they merely don’t like. Capping off the book is a handful of one- and two-page stories, including “Pie and Wings,” in which a guy at a diner instantly falls in love with a waitress.
Paxson often playfully animates these speculative settings with more familiar plots. For example, in “Trizark,” Nedrillo Goodrin, a gorgon farmer on Mudball, attends his very first wedding—his son’s union with a human woman. With gorgons, humans, and crocodilians bumping elbows, there’s a very good chance that a fight will break out. “Troupe” is about a government agent, Gordon Axelrod, who jumps onto the H.M.S. Pinaforewith clawed Tyrakians in pursuit. They want the mysterious metal egg that Gordon has and threaten everyone onboard if he doesn’t hand it over. When Gordon is mistaken for an actor in an upcoming musical, that’s just one more thing for him to worry about. Some of these tales are dark, and even grotesque, though never excessively so. In “From the Wall,” a long-imprisoned creature escapes and vows to kill myriad humans, starting with the man it feeds on and whose “flayed skin” it wears like a suit. The author’s razor-sharp prose aptly depicts these strange places and diverse species; even a situation as recognizable as a man reacting to a Dear John letter generates a memorable passage: “I sat in the big cushion for a long time letting sweat run down over the letter and dissolve its words. My thumbs rubbed until most of the writing was a bleary mess and the paper was soggy. I ripped it into limp shreds and tossed it against the wall. Another damn lovely day.”
Wonderfully detailed worlds propel these enthralling stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Dana Paxson Studio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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