A successful and compelling space opera full of grit and imagination.
A big, brash sci-fi epic about the destiny of warring planets and their respective inhabitants.
As the first part of a planned series, the book’s title is a double entendre; there are many planets and races in Laborde’s fictional universe, but they share one cosmic destiny. The first pages hurl the reader into a torrent of myth and prophecy and then drive headlong into a fiery cluster of futuristic aeronautic warfare. The author only briefly touches upon the story’s time and setting for a few passages as readers surge through the tense atmosphere created by a commanding prose style and the author’s precisely martial imagination. Eventually, though, between the intense training sessions of space warriors with names such as Hunter and Prowler and interstellar fleet conflicts between the Pack and the Swarm, the novel’s mythos takes shape amid a barrage of barking admirals and powerful queens. Between two worlds, evocatively named Lycera and Nefera, lies the Void, a mysterious abyss in space that separates the planets and makes travel to each system’s borders costly and protracted. Surrounding the nothingness are the anxieties and myths of the warriors, as many assume that the Void devours all who attempt to transverse it. But when a passage is found through the Void and a group from the Pack are forced to abandon ship on the surface of their target, the war, and perhaps eventual peace, between the worlds takes on a new dimension. It’s an unapologetic space opera and even the habitually italicized dialogue doesn’t distract from the legitimacy and gravity of the novel’s epic events. As with most science-fiction series, the finale is bittersweet, but Laborde answers just enough questions and coaxes out just enough mystery at the conclusion to leave readers wanting more adventure, more revelations and the crowning resolution.
A successful and compelling space opera full of grit and imagination.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983448518
Page Count: 282
Publisher: dflBookworks
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
