An effective, moral-driven sci-fi fable clad in alien-invasion costuming.
Society (and possibly human evolution) faces upheaval when babies resembling gray-skinned aliens appear all over the world.
Suddenly, random pregnant mothers around the world give birth to babies with what becomes known as Handel’s Syndrome: froglike gray skin, oversized heads, huge dark eyes, spindly limbs —the stereotype of a Whitley Strieber flying-saucer alien. Officialdom takes little notice of the supposed birth defects at first, with the exception of hard-charging CIA spook Ray Johnston, who finds missilelike empty casings made of alloy Not of This World—evidence of an ET bioweapon seeding the “HS children” and creating an insidious vanguard for an alien invasion. The ensemble narrative, formidably spanning generations, cuts between Johnston’s rising political career, based on alarm and paranoia, and a few of the maturing HS-born “Alien Americans.” Franklin Trinity was abandoned on a church doorstep and raised by compassionate priests and nuns; nonetheless, the increasing intolerance and violence against his kind radicalizes him into becoming an enemy of “monkey people” and their “monkey god.” Jim Miller was born to an initially shocked, uneducated Texas farm family; nonetheless, their acceptance of his appearance makes him a key figure in defending the new species. Peloso (Tiny Ghosts, 2014) visits sci-fi territory previously trodden by John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and Richard Matheson’s short story “Born of Man and Woman,” but he takes it to a big-picture, humanist level. Characters do tend to come across more like ideas and stances rather than fully three-dimensional personalities, and the dialogue leans toward simplistic exposition or dry scientific explanations (during a briefing, Johnston discusses the odd casings: “The first significant thing that we found was that this material isn’t typical of any known alloy we’ve put into space. I’ve had the object analyzed, and it has a very strange isotopic spectrum. It’s primarily made of steel and tungsten, but the isotopic ratios are unlike those typically found on earth”). But in the honored Rod Serling sci-fi tradition, the premise presents a strong allegory of bigotry and the self-fulfilling worst expectations inherent in xenophobia. Even with the wobbly incorporation of Roswell/Area 51 and UFO mythology, the message comes across powerfully, especially in light of the war on terror.
An effective, moral-driven sci-fi fable clad in alien-invasion costuming.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-931468-26-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: The Invisible College Press
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2017
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
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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