Tongue-in-cheek military SF that leans heavier on action than comedy.
A band of space-going reality TV adventurers is forced into a dangerous smuggling escapade to aid an alien civilization of tortoises in their war against genocidal humanoid hares.
Pearce continues his Green Charisma series of sardonic space-opera adventures in this series entry. In the future, videographer-producer-director Ian “Mac” MacIntyre aspires to package a reality TV action series starring his two partners. Joe Drake, portraying Captain Charisma, is a big, boisterous former soldier whose past exploits keep coming back to haunt the team, and Sanraya ba’Marta is a Vellaran—a formidable and alluring female lizard-humanoid—acting as an adjunct fighter and general purpose science officer. (Vellarans’ “heads are roundish, like a human’s, and they have two eyes, two earflaps, and a nose. Granted, their mouths are filled with serrated triangular teeth, but emotionally they differ little from humans.”) She has also become the acrimoniously divorced Mac’s lover (apparently, the sex between Mac and Sanraya is, well, out of this world). But business has been slow, and their Green Charisma Chronicles reality TV enterprise faces ruin if the team fails to contrive episodes with some sort of excitement. The trio undertake an assignment from a non-human humanitarian organization to smuggle vital medicine to a distant, resource-rich world derisively known as Clodhopper. There, a genocidal empire called the Polavians, whose members happen to bear an ironic resemblance to fluffy bunny rabbits, is waging a campaign of occupation and extermination against the less advanced, terrapinlike natives called Clodhoppers. (It’s a tortoise vs. hare situation, but escalated to an interplanetary conflict.) The stakes get higher when the Alliance (a military authority) steps in and forces the heroes to accept contraband weapons to deliver to the embattled Clodhoppers. Further complications include the spaceship provided for the job (an unimpressive-looking vessel piloted by a saucy artificial intelligence), resentful rival mercenaries out to grab the mission for themselves, and the fact that “Captain Charisma” Joe previously fought the nasty, long-eared Polavians during his legitimate military career and is now considered an infamous war criminal with a substantial bounty on his head.
The yarn is mostly military SF blended with a minor, sidelong satire of entertainment media; Mac has to repeatedly remind himself and readers that drone cameras are in play, and that the squad are supposed to be filming a show (“Tracking my gaze, a heads-up display allowed me to control the camera’s flight operations, lighting, focus, zoom function, and other features”). Though generous opportunities for spoofing present themselves readily—after all, we are talking about killer rabbit commandos, not to mention noble Clodhoppers carrying an echo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag reference—the preponderance of the material is delivered in a mock-serious manner by Mac’s he-man first-person narration (“Interrogation is a four-letter word. Nobody likes doing it, myself included, but armies and police have been using it as a means to gather useful intelligence for eons”). Battleground action on land and in the atmosphere rarely lets up, ornamented with occasional inspired puns (the tortoise-folk’s resistance is called the “Shellshock Syndicate”) and absurdities. More rambunctious installments in the series are promised.
Tongue-in-cheek military SF that leans heavier on action than comedy.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798989832132
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2024
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
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
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