An involving start to an uneven but intriguing new SF series.
A futuristic, alternate-history SF novel about a space-conquering Sino-Roman Empire.
In 2820, in the far away space colony of Breakspear Alpha, farm-raised, robotics enthusiast Sorrento accidentally raises a powerful, secret weapon from a 500-year slumber. The novel toggles to 2300s, and the Sino-Roman Empire faces its most dangerous enemy yet when the first aliens they encounter in their space voyages deploy weapons of mass destruction, bringing the powerful Empire to its knees. But a couple of scientists working on the experimental project Gemini have a possible means for salvation: the twins Shade and Themis, genetically modified humans capable of blending their minds with Artificial Intelligence and integrating into ships. Should they succeed in their mission, the Empire will survive, despite the high loss of human lives in the Galaxy War, but the leader of the Empire demands that once the war is over, Shade and Themis must be terminated to avoid a future where the human species is changed forever. As the timelines converge, a new threat to the last surviving colonies of the Empire emerges and Sorrento, alongside recently awakened Shade and his companion AI, Selene, must engage with the Empire’s past to discover long-held secrets. Gilbert’s smart SF adventure is the first in a series that imagines an alternate future stemming from a Roman Empire that never collapsed, thanks to a timely alliance with another superpower, China. The result is an appealing choice—a space-traveling Empire that merges ancient Roman and Chinese beliefs (“As the Sino-Roman Empires had merged, so had the Tables and the Lotus”) and relies on quantum physics and AI. The worldbuilding is immersive, and Shade, Selene, and Sorrento gain more agency as the story progresses. Large sections of exposition hold back the action, however, and typos often distract. Still, the story’s developing take on power, quantum physics, and human identity is well done.
An involving start to an uneven but intriguing new SF series.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9781638124627
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Pen Culture Solutions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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