Ravenous demons at large on a sinful space outpost, aimed at a readership looking for familiar interstellar thrills.
An enormous space station/laboratory orbiting Jupiter faces dangers from within and without in Martineau’s SF debut.
Sometime in the future, the Parallax—a vast space station—orbits Jupiter. For 15 years the facility has developed a technology dubbed Deep Light, intended to generate, investigate, and control the first human-made black hole. The International Conglomerate for Expeditions and Explorations is backing the project. They are an all-powerful military-industrial agency staffed by “a bunch of cruel, heartless bastards.” Many ICEE employees succumb to “space madness” and become homicidal or die in grisly workplace mishaps. ICEE dispatches manager John Roberts to Parallax to oversee Deep Light’s activation. The Parallax’s crew of thousands has been reduced to a skeleton staff of 40, and Roberts has orders to kill anyone who impedes the project…or who knows more about it than they should. Other hidden ICEE assets have a similarly lethal mission to steal Deep Light for potential weaponization. When surveillance cameras fail, technicians start going missing or are found dead and savagely dismembered. Have the ICEE assassins grown impatient? Or are there more monstrous threats afoot? Fans of cinematic SF will immediately note the plot’s resemblance to the setup of the 1979 film Alien: There’s a big, creepy, deserted space outpost, foul and taloned creatures, and imperiled characters obliviously and endlessly wandering the corridors. The author provides a quasi-religious/occult explanation for the horror reminiscent of the movie Event Horizon’s (1997) premise. Dialogue ranges from flat-footed declarations (“That’s probably from when the thing ripped off Kevin’s head”) to wisecracking snark (“Talk about a cleanup on aisle one”). The science—much ado about energy fields and wormholes—isn’t too taxing, and the action will please bloodthirsty fans with H.R. Giger “Xenomorph” posters lovingly tacked up on their walls.
Ravenous demons at large on a sinful space outpost, aimed at a readership looking for familiar interstellar thrills.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9781663248183
Page Count: 346
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.
Brown is back with Book 4 of his Red Rising series (Morning Star, 2016, etc.) and explores familiar themes of rebellion, revenge, and political instability.
This novel examines the ramifications and pitfalls of trying to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. The events here take place 10 years after the conclusion of Morning Star, which ended on a seemingly positive note. Darrow, aka Reaper, and his lover, Virginia au Augustus, aka Mustang, had vanquished the Golds, the elite ruling class, so hope was held out that a new order would arise. But in the new book it becomes clear that the concept of political order is tenuous at best, for Darrow’s first thoughts are on the forces of violence and chaos he has unleashed: “famines and genocide...piracy...terrorism, radiation sickness and disease...and the one hundred million lives lost in my [nuclear] war.” Readers familiar with the previous trilogy—and you'll have to be if you want to understand the current novel—will welcome a familiar cast of characters, including Mustang, Sevro (Darrow’s friend and fellow warrior), and Lysander (grandson of the Sovereign). Readers will also find familiarity in Brown’s idiosyncratic naming system (Cassius au Bellona, Octavia au Lune) and even in his vocabulary for cursing (“Goryhell,” “Bloodydamn,” “Slag that”). Brown introduces a number of new characters, including 18-year-old Lyria, a survivor of the initial Rising who gives a fresh perspective on the violence of the new war—and violence is indeed never far away from the world Brown creates. (He includes one particularly gruesome gladiatorial combat between Cassius and a host of enemies.) Brown imparts an epic quality to the events in part by his use of names. It’s impossible to ignore the weighty connotations of characters when they sport names like Bellerephon, Diomedes, Dido, and Apollonius.
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28591-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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