A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.
Robotics enthusiast and wicked storyteller Wilson follows up a masterful fantasy novel (The Clockwork Dynasty, 2017, etc.) with a collection of 14 kindred, often creepy stories.
Any fan of Wilson’s should definitely pick up this paperback original, composed of stories clipped from pulpy collections like The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013) and sprinkled with a few richly imagined anomalies. In the opener, “Miss Gloria,” a robot named Chiron resurrects himself time after time until his ward can fend for herself. In the tear-jerker “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever,” an astrophysicist spends one last day with his 3-year-old daughter. A mechanical man questions the nature of his identity in “Jack, the Determined.” Seemingly a master of many subgenres, Wilson can nod to cyberpunk in “The Executor,” hard science fiction in “Helmet,” and speculative horror in “Blood Memory.” He grounds his characters, even in worlds disappearing before their eyes, by giving them identities through their occupations: we meet a meteorologist in “Foul Weather” and a taxonomist in “Garden of Life,” both trying so hard to understand a world torn asunder by forces they can’t understand. As one imagines he might, Wilson pays fan service to longtime readers with a Robopocalypse story, “Parasite,” set in the trenches of war and starring Lark Iron Cloud and a lovely steampunk slice from the world of The Clockwork Dynasty, “One for Sorrow,” starring the ever childlike avtomat Elena Petrova. These tales sound thrilling, and they often are, but Wilson has a special talent for wringing emotion out of his tech-tinged stories, from the love of a grandfather in “The Nostalgist” to the awful longing of an avatar who misses his true love in “God Mode.” Wilson sticks the landing with “Special Automatic,” a story that channels the movie My Bodyguard by way of a Frankenstein-ian automaton.
A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-97201-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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