An accomplished and emotionally complex interplanetary tale.
While searching off-world for their absent father, two siblings are arrested and sentenced to brutal labor in Mallery’s SF novel.
Twenty-year-old Cade Carpenter and 18-year-old Claire Carpenter live on Arenaria, a dusty mining planet within the Realm—a conglomerate of hundreds of inhabited worlds whose shared criminal justice system divides the populace into ’zens (law-abiding citizens kept healthy by nanite implants) and 24s (an indentured workforce—mostly convicted felons—whose lowly status is signified by yellow wrist implants). Cade struggles with guilt over the death-by-misadventure of his first and only girlfriend; Claire has been hanging out with 24s and has become addicted to synth, a powdered drug that comes in different colors and mental “flavors.” After a synth dealer attacks, their mother winds up in a coma; soon afterward, the siblings learn that their father, whom they thought was long dead, may still be alive. They travel to Casmiri, a decadent and seedy tourist world, where they attempt to book passage to Tēleos—an illicit destination where they’ll be free from the Realm’s governance. The authorities catch and convict them, however, and they both become 24s. Cade is sent to the mines in the asteroid belts surrounding Casmiri, and Claire is put to work in a club/brothel in Casmiri’s Lantern District.Can they escape and reunite with their father? Mallery’s assured prose alternates between the third-person perspectives of Cade and Claire, who contrast well with each other: He’s a sensible, responsible, and protective big brother, while she’s an impetuous tearaway whose addictive tendencies and sense of denial are balanced by a blazing sense of justice. Mallery’s worldbuilding is so deftly executed that occasional expository “intertext” chapters sometimes prove redundant. As in the best SF stories, the world’s technological elements allow for social commentary that hits close to home. Claire and Cade’s quest is absorbing in its own right, but its undercurrents of corruption and exploitation evoke real-world visions of refugees desperate to start new lives in far-off countries. The siblings’ situation unravels quickly, but the story moves with some urgency toward a satisfying, self-contained denouement.
An accomplished and emotionally complex interplanetary tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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