A rambunctious, eco-themed satire fires death-ray volleys at the media and corporate greed.
The unethical commercial rollout of a life-threatening cellular communications technology affects a wide spectrum of characters in Drum’s SF novel.
Percival “Piggy” McGuffin, a corpulent and seven-times married “corporate titan” head of cellphone company Universal Cellular (“Piggy sprang from a long line of ruthless, obsessivelycompetitive men”) is about to launch his latest venture, an upgrade to microwave frequencies that promises more profits. Dr. Trish Maypole, one of the company’s research scientists, finds the unleashed radiation is deadly to test animals and, by extension, to all life. Instead of her warning being heeded, she and the rest of her division are fired. Her attempts to alert the (generally idiotic) media lead her to teaming up with a disgruntled obituary writer from Detroit named Joe, who has a volatile temper—but at least he cares. Meanwhile, vainglorious scientist Bruno Crawley proudly possesses the world’s last colony of Pongo River Migrating Ants. His grad-student lab assistant in entomology is Rafter Cadenza, a Jamaican distracted from his antsitting duties by attractive co-eds, specifically a duo of sensual and otherworldly Wiccan women. The action occasionally shifts to a couple of characters who readers later learn resemble Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a “Prince” and “Princess” on the run in a fantasy realm; their true nature is a fun reveal. Meanwhile, wise, peaceful, and concerned humanoids in a spaceship observe the radiation-imperiled Earth; their true nature is telegraphed rather baldly by the book’s subtitle. The impish author, with his outsized depictions of human foibles (mainly greed, ego, and irresponsibility), may remind some readers of Leonard Wibberly, of The Mouse That Roared (1955) fame, though the book’s ribald sex scenes and more surreal elements (including an alarmed cameo by the writer himself) are closer to the work of Tom Robbins. All of the quick cross-cutting between the ensemble cast builds a neat comic momentum (good thing, as these stereotypes work best in small doses). A short afterword directs readers to study the potential real-life hazards of cellular signals, though very little in the main text belabors serious scientific concerns.
A rambunctious, eco-themed satire fires death-ray volleys at the media and corporate greed.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780991185788
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Burning Books Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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