A nuanced exploration of the superhero mythos that prioritizes interiority and personal stakes.
In Big Plume’s SF novel, a young woman grapples with the pressures of having to save the Earth from a deadly peril.
Fifteen-year-old Alexandra Linley shoulders a terrible burden. At the age of 3, she used her energy-siphoning powers to save her hometown, New Port Falls, from fiery destruction by a nuclear weapon called the Luminous Arrow. Widely hailed as a savior, she became known as the “Avatar of Hope.” Recruited into the Defender Initiative at a young age, she attends the New Port Falls Academy for Extra-Biological Students, an institute for young people with abilities such as mind reading and telekinesis. Soon, the Earth will face a new peril, and Lexi is widely believed to be the only person alive with the power to stop it. From the depths of space, an entity known as the Invading Darkness is approaching. The day of its arrival (“Zero Day”) is known, as is the scope of its destruction: the annihilation of all life. Lexi’s father, Stephen, and her teachers and trainers are keen to impress upon her the enormity of the task she now faces; as the only person in history to have neutralized a nuclear weapon, she must find a way to subdue the Darkness. Overwhelmed and seeking a normal life, Lexi revolts, running away and committing acts of aggression and vigilantism. Stephen is killed by the Heralds of the Liberating Darkness, a group of fanatics who see annihilation as release from suffering. The Heralds then hatch a scheme to torment and kill Lexi, filling her head with nightmarish visions and forcing her to relive her worst moments. With Zero Day nearing, Lexi must confront her own anger and stubbornness and accept her vocation as savior.
Big Plume has taken a worn plot, with echoes of both superhero comics and the later seasons of the Netflix series Stranger Things, and fashioned a character study that interrogates themes of responsibility, trauma, and societal expectations. The author’s sensitivity to the inner lives of his characters, both good and bad, makes this novel a refreshing change of pace in an overcrowded genre. The narrative stumbles a bit with its protagonist, whose lack of personality will make it difficult for readers to invest in her story. (Her most notable traits are a love of penguins and a habit of spiraling into despair, anger, and self-recrimination.) The book does a number of things exceptionally well; Big Plume introduces a subtle thread of lament for the modern age: “Children stare at tablets while their families sit around them, wondering why they can’t have a conversation,” one character complains. The Invading Darkness functions as a metaphor for the screen-induced isolation that humanity has inflicted on itself, and Big Plume’s social commentary renders Lexi’s conflict with a rather nebulous entity meaningful. The great temptation of stories in this genre is to make the final act all fight and no substance, a trap that Big Plume evades by centering the climactic battle around a pivotal encounter between two people. The book has action aplenty, all beautifully narrated, but the decision to make the stakes personal rather than global gives that action the emotional power necessary for a truly slam-bang finale, making the final chapters some of the best in the book.
A nuanced exploration of the superhero mythos that prioritizes interiority and personal stakes.Pub Date: June 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781069408716
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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