An enjoyable, seriocomic space yarn about the ultimate grand central station.
A mysterious installation somewhere in the cosmos serves as a ramshackle way station for a colorful variety of humans gone missing throughout the multiverse in Frechette’s SF novel.
Somewhere in space, the Crossroads is a wheel-shaped habitat built by the “founders” (possibly aliens) and kept running by aging robots and a somewhat inconsistent crew of humans. It hosts new arrivals from the masses of Homo sapiensthroughout the multiverse who, over centuries, have simply disappeared—via wormholes, black holes, freak teleports, or accidents (cave-ins, plane crashes) leaving no traces of survivors. Most of these “Transients” are shunted to fresh existences elsewhere; depending on their behavior and how much they can pay, Transients can find a pleasant landing somewhere else in the universe or be dropped into slavery (or worse). Other Transients become long-term residents (“Barnacles”) or functionaries of the Crossroads. Beth McDee is a streetwise, unhoused Black lesbian from 1980s South Florida who arrives via a plane mishap and learns she has natural skills that might allow her to advance in the Crossroads hierarchy—if she follows the rules. Renata is an academic from the early 1970s obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle who deliberately arrived at the Crossroads in a tiny boat. Flavius commands of a quartet of Roman soldiers and is tasked with instituting the Crossroads’ first human police force; Sakhmat is a long-term staffer, an oft-fiery ancient Egyptian noblewoman whose Sapphic leanings lead to an ill-starred affair with Beth. Beth and Renata get to tell their stories first-person, in semi-hip dialogue (“not my first ride at this rodeo”). The characters’ interlinked comings, goings, and evolutions twine with the mounting crisis of the Crossroads showing its decrepitude. By the ending (which teases the possibility of a sequel), the full truth about the place remains undisclosed—Frechette’s emphasis throughout the story is more on characterization and relationships than mind-blowing science or hefty technology. This convivial yarn might appeal to fans of Spider Robinson’s fondly remembered Callahan’s Crosstime Saloonseries, but it nicely finds its own way.
An enjoyable, seriocomic space yarn about the ultimate grand central station.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781038318480
Page Count: 312
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2025
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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