An engaging Armageddon space adventure with an angelic young hero; a religious course correction ultimately enters from the...
As an all-devouring menace approaches the solar system, Earth’s hope for survival rests on a dangerous mission that one brave pilot must undertake.
In Levin’s (Rue, 2015, etc.) sci-fi novel, a “phase transition” in space is sweeping across the universe, moving faster than the speed of light and annihilating every particle in its path. Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations fall before the catastrophe, their technology useless to escape. Earth scientists calculate the devastation is 11 months away from their planet and brainstorm a long-shot solution; a warhead carrying a special heavy-element payload striking the disaster at just the right point of impact could stop it. But steering the delivery vehicle through intense radiation will make it a virtual suicide mission for any pilot. Despite the apocalyptic threat, humanity finds few volunteers among the astronaut elite. But in Houston, a controversial experimental program has set up a school where children with Down syndrome receive genetic treatments to restore impaired brain function. For patient Bobby Alderson, the cure means he rapidly develops a 196 IQ with incredibly accelerated math/science abilities—coupled with the innate goodness and eagerness to please supposedly typical of Down kids. Bobby has the right stuff in many ways, but will the miracle boy be sacrificed among the stars to save the universe? Fortunately—or not, depending on whether readers desire their “Flowers for Algernon” pathos served straight up or watered down—the author throws in some super-science twists to be merciful to saintly, personable Bobby when things take flight in the third act. Eventually, a strong religious angle comes into play, with disclosures of the phase transition’s true nature. While the message is not linked to the book of Revelation, evangelical-minded readers should approve. Levin offers a fast-paced narrative not weighed down by a slablike page count, despite galaxy-spanning scale and the gravitas of an ultimate-doom epic. But even with the overall brevity, there are asteroid fields of STEM-heavy passages (“Bright points blurred while others disappeared as gravitational lensing distorted cosmic optics. Phase Craft Two began to vibrate. Its antigravity engines hurtled the spaceship along a tangent Bobby had calculated to escape the star’s deadly radiation and avoid empyrean bodies within three light years”). The author wisely navigates these portions via crosscuts to the hand-wringing on Earth.
An engaging Armageddon space adventure with an angelic young hero; a religious course correction ultimately enters from the wings.Pub Date: July 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73383-510-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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