An inventive, fast-paced SF thriller.
In Acuff’s SF novel, the first in a series, a soldier in hiding attempts to discover the secret of the ghost haunting his biosynthetic body.
The year is 2561. Human colonies have spread across the universe through the use of wormholes, and extreme genetic modification has progressed to the point where some people, like Jacques Bastille, have become very hard to kill. When Jacques wakes up in the middle of a dune-filled desert, one of his biosynthetic arms ripped from its socket, he looks up to find his spaceship wrecked and smoldering nearby. He has no idea how he got there—his mind is missing key information, and his memories seem to be spliced with those of another person, a test pilot on Earth named Dash Strouthers. Jacques’ first order of business is to fight off the reptile-like bounty hunters that shot him down. He steals their ship and heads to the edge of the settled universe to find out who wants him dead and why. There he visits Bender the Reek, the universe’s last living Reek (or Re-cycle geek), whose business is extending human life by illegally replanting consciousnesses in new bodies (or “meat-suits,” to use the industry parlance). Bender is the man who put Jacques in his current meat-suit; he’s also the one who tried to collect the bounty. Jacques forces Bender to reattach his arm but has to flee before he finds out why Bender has several tanks filled with meat-suit versions of the woman in Dash Strouthers’ visions: Dash’s beautiful, blue-haired Mizuke. As Dash’s consciousness grows stronger in Jacques’ body, the confused fugitive relies on the dead man’s piloting skills to survive on the treacherous frontier of space. As he goes, Jacques attempts to figure out his own past as a former king of the Ma’Kobi clan who retired in the midst of a conflict with an authoritarian warlord—as well as how he came to be linked with Dash Strouthers and a mysterious biosynthetic woman named Mizuke BLU.
The novel’s lore, particularly when it comes to genetic modification, is complex and jargon-heavy, but Acuff brings texture and humor to work, as well as the ability to humanize the characters, even those who aren’t recognizably human. Here a medic—who is described as looking more like a mechanic—appraises a patient: “She ain’t like us, man. She’s gentetically altercated. Total bonzai! She is stable. But inna computer terms, it’s more’n like, I dunno, sleep mode than a coma. Her skinbag is fixin’ ‘erself right up at a super high cycle, but her mind shows zippo activity.” The narrative’s DNA is at least three-quarters action movie, with scene after scene of fistfights, shootouts, explosions, and escapes. Acuff’s touch is light enough to handle the transitions between Jacques and Dash, though, and while readers will initially be pulled along by the set pieces, they will soon find themselves invested in the convoluted mystery of the protagonists’ origins. Most will return to find out what happens in the next volume.
An inventive, fast-paced SF thriller.Pub Date: May 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798988829324
Page Count: 441
Publisher: BravoBay Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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