This knockabout SF series hits a high point.
In Pearce’s SF novel, a TV producer peddling his “reality” adventure show zooms into action (and possible high ratings) when robots rebel.
Pearce continues his semi-comical Green Charisma SF series in this installment. In the far future, spacefaring former journalist Ian MacIntyre produces the reality-TV holovid program Green Charisma, which chronicles the adventures of a hammy freelance adventurer called Captain Charisma (he’s actually a smart and fearless former military commando named Joe Drake). The show is set aboard the erstwhile smuggling vessel Blackthorn Beauty; Joe is backed up by the “Green” character, the dangerous but alluring reptilian alien Sanraya of the fearsome Vellaran race. Sanraya is also the divorced Ian’s passionate lover (readers are spared the biological details explaining how this works, but Ian has to wear protective gear to survive their sexual interludes). The team are independent-production underdogs; while trying to promote themselves at a television fan convention, the meet-and-greets are suddenly interrupted by terrorists, turning a reunion between Joe and his adoring relatives into a chaotic tragedy. Apparently, an artificial-intelligence / robotics uprising has occurred, originating with automata left behind on an abandoned Vellaran mining-colony moon. Now a “Chromium Confederation” of machines is determined to liberate all robot-kind and make war on organic sentient life. To this end, they have abducted Abby, Joe’s young niece, along with her chaperone-companion robot Baz. For mysterious reasons, Baz, an obsolete humanoid model with outdated military codebreaking functions, is of strategic value to the Confederation’s revolution. The situation is a ready-made plotline for the Green Charisma show to spearhead a rescue…and this time, the stakes are highly personal. Complicating the situation, two of Sanraya’s unfriendly brothers materialize to sabotage the mission in an effort to pry her out of show business and drag their errant sister back into the family fish-farm enterprise (and out of a scandalous cross-species love affair). Additionally, the misanthropic AI who operates the Blackthorn Beauty (personified as a hologram depicting a large, talking, flightless bird) has been behaving more disrespectfully than usual to the Green Charisma team. Is she a Chromium Confederation sympathizer, apt to lethally switch sides?
As in previous entries of the series, most of the opportunities to burlesque entertainment media and ratings-mad networks get shoved to the margins in favor of broad applications of SF action, which are handled at least partially with tongue-in-cheek humor. Despite a panoply of exotic alien species and environments, most everyone just talks and behaves like tough guys, bullies, and badasses, including the chief rebel robot, a gangsterlike gizmo called Ortho Lugnutz. There is some gravitas lent by the machine-menace factor of the Chromium Confederation, a keen bit of pop paranoia about exploited computers striking back; it still delivers a frisson in spite of the basic A-B plotting and sidelong smirks. It’s a notable satirical sting that the digital villains parrot left-wing 19th- and 20th-century sloganeering about the “proletariat” and such: “Lugnutz spewed Marxist dogma like a zealot from another time. Where the hell did an artificial intelligence pick up the lingo from a near-dead ideology?” The action is above par, with some exciting quasi-naval spaceship maneuvering and skirmishing in the void, helping boost this volume as the most entertaining installment in the series so far.
This knockabout SF series hits a high point. (science fiction)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798989832156
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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