Bloomsday meets The Twilight Zone via a winding and densely philosophical sci-fi tale packed into a slim volume.
In a future, high-tech Dublin, bounty hunters search for clones who possess a momentous secret linked to a distant planet.
This literary sci-fi novel from Sparling (The Western Killer, 2015) takes place largely in future Dublin, and there is a too-easy temptation to associate it with Joyce’s Dubliners. Just add robots and crank up the lyrical/bardic quality of the storyteller’s language and ruminations. A free-roaming and chronologically recursive narrative reveals that, thanks to geography, Dublin has largely weathered the climate change that spawned jungles throughout the rest of Ireland. But society remains at the mercy of organized crime, and a cruel new hostage scheme has kidnappers plugging comatose victims into transparent automaton exoskeletons wired with bombs. When they go on bank-robbing sprees, police cannot interfere because the hulks are technically innocent bystanders. High in the rackets is a woman named Quennie. Her one-time mentor and the father of her son, Rohan, was one of four clones commissioned by a mysterious adventurer and space-war fugitive guarding a consciousness-altering resource on a distant planet. Knowing the mob would never leave him alone about it, he seeded himself in the scattered clones so the secret would survive. Now bounty hunters are targeting the clones, and Rohan must complete the quest. In the interstitials and marginalia of the drifting narrative, Sparling laments the addled condition of poor Homo sapiens, burdened with self-destructive greed, lust, violence, addictions, and existential dread. Characters thirst for meaning and hope in a transitory universe where God seems to have found better things to do—lofty thoughts indeed, beyond ray-gun stuff, strongly expressed with a great deal of passion. Wisely, the material has the page count of a trim book of verse rather than the brick-thick exegesis preferred by a few scribes of experimental sci-fi. Nor does Sparling make the mistake of imitating the style of sci-fi’s grandmaster poet/philosopher (and confirmed Hibernophile) Ray Bradbury. A subplot about a war between galactic empire kingdoms, the “Khans” and the “Cantonese,” is either a jarring, far-out intrusion or a coded metaphor for more mundane, terrestrial matters—as could be the entire novel, for that matter.
Bloomsday meets The Twilight Zone via a winding and densely philosophical sci-fi tale packed into a slim volume.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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