Diverting, seriocomic SF exploring causality, wormholes, life, death, God, philosophy, and funny physics.
In Diamond’s SF novel, various individuals circle experiments undertaken to explore and sort out tangled parallel worlds.
Visionary but profit-hungry Dr. Marco Spelling has obtained a Newfoundland mountain and outfitted its interior with a heavy-water pool as a neutrino-particle detector. This neutrino “mine” is not an altruistic project, but rather a speculative effort to make money by forecasting disasters on the theory that a jump in neutrino counts is an omen of coming catastrophe. A potential client is professor Nathan Sloan, a maverick scientist exploring the landscapes of alternate universes and variant timelines (“Spelling was a leader with no followers while the Professor was a leader who wanted no followers”). Sloan has created a vaguely sentient robot (or two) to detect likely mathematical points where timelines open portals to variant worlds. The widowed Sloan also groomed his daughter, Darien, to assist him in the decades-long endeavor, but Darien has opted to join the U.S. military instead, becoming an able fighter pilot. When her lover vanishes through a portal in an Egyptian pyramid during a Sloan expedition, Darien steals her favorite jet and robot to attempt a rescue, but she crash lands in Libya. Threaded through this narrative web are “Alternates,” shape-shifting humans with an innate ability to dwell in non-linear timelines. One of these rarities, McBarrister, has tasked himself with trying to correct the disarray in the cosmos spawned by Sloan and Spelling’s meddling. With chapters set off by light verses and limericks, the novel is humorous in the vein of SF master R.A. Lafferty’s work, with perhaps a touch of James Thurber (and dialogue punch-ups by Tom Stoppard). The narrative stutter-steps in a back-and-forth chronology, and the text often addresses the reader directly while emphasizing that this is but a yarn—though one with a startlingly downbeat ending. The pseudonymous author, a scientist in real life, includes an introduction to clarify the basic plotline (an indicator of the potential confusion ahead); he reveals that a partial inspiration for the tale was, of all things, the 1959 Disney live-action fantasy film Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
Diverting, seriocomic SF exploring causality, wormholes, life, death, God, philosophy, and funny physics.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798335198837
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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