This undercooked tale with a sci-fi disaster premise delivers meticulous, real-world, global warming information.
In this debut novel, research teams in the United States and France foresee catastrophic food shortages, traceable to climate change, and try a radical solution.
In 2032, U.S. President James Clark (no party affiliation given) orders a study on how the exhaustion of petroleum supplies could affect American crops and livestock, possibly triggering a food shortage crisis. It turns out the looming calamity is real but the cause is different. French researchers on a parallel path find that melting polar glaciers are flushing huge quantities of fresh water into the sea, playing havoc with the balmy Gulf Stream climate on which their nation’s farmers rely. It throws into sharp focus a trend of escalating temperatures that even in small increments upset nature’s delicate balance, creating storms, droughts, and deep freezes, with poor harvests and empty larders a result. While the author criticizes “non-scientist” skeptics who belittle the evidence for climate change because of its subtlety and intricacy, there are no villains (not even Fox News) to call out. Instead, a coalition of military personnel and scientists, like the vaguely Al Gore-esque Dr. Paul Anderson, undertakes “Operation Vulcan,” a groundbreaking— literally—act of terraforming. Many indeed are the novels that have tried to wring drama, death, and disaster out of climate change/global warming scenarios (anyone ever research the carbon footprint generated by printing and distributing all of them?). They are almost always apocalyptic action tales. Instead of going the Mad Max/Hunger Games route, Phillipson takes a far less sensational scientific approach, downloading reams of climatology material via fictional characters as mouthpieces or advocates. The ambitious book is well-researched and offers plenty of rich, sobering details about climate change; there are more than 70 pages of notes, appendices, and an index. But with textbook-ish prose, the work seems more like a throwback to the Victorian brand of sci-fi that was akin to thought experiments speculating on new technologies or social evolutions rather than an inventive story that provides page-turning thrills. The closing note is cautionary instead of optimistic.
This undercooked tale with a sci-fi disaster premise delivers meticulous, real-world, global warming information.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8924-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2018
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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