Futuristic and historical plots collide in this engaging, if overstuffed, time-hopping tale.
Scientists in the 23rd century try to use time-traveling tech to stop their government from acquiring a mind-controlling serum in this SF novel.
University of Pennsylvania professor Loganus Minilar is riding high in 2203. Construction on his Trance Interface Platform, a sentient machine capable of accessing the collective unconscious, is right on track. Then his mother and older sister, both scientists, ruin everything. They warn him that they’re part of a political revolution against the government, which has reputedly injected 91% of the citizens of the United States of North America with SR232, which controls minds. This derails Loganus’ plans, as PharmaGov, which sponsors his project, will shut it down when they learn that his relatives are rebels. But his Platform can save everyone from certain doom. Coupled with spacetime tech, it can travel to the past and prevent a scientist from even developing SR232 back in 2021. The Platform “recruits” three people on its own—mid-19th-century Wales teen Miriam Susston, U.S. high school graduate Kevin Journell, and African American Tanya Batiste, who’s at a Japanese monastery (her Buddhist name is Oksan). Both the latter are living in 2019. The three unite on “the Dream Wheel,” as they call the large, circular platform, but they don’t know why they’re recruits. Loganus and his family are also baffled, and they struggle to earn these strangers’ trust. The group interacts via holograms but also travels through time in corporeal form. With any luck, they’ll shut down the serum’s production before it starts without inciting “butterfly effects.” All the while, the nefarious CEO/president of PharmaGov closes in on Loganus and his allies.
Gauthier jampacks his story with plot and character details. The 23rd-century storyline proves the most remarkable. Loganus is a green-blooded chlorohuman whose body gets most of its energy from the sun, and his xenobiologist mother lab-created an intelligent, tentacled being that communicates telepathically. This SF outing mixes in a solid historical tale with the recruits’ different eras and passing years. For example, Kevin becomes a Marine fighting in Afghanistan, and Miriam takes a harrowing sea journey to America as the Indian Wars rage. Still, the SF element remains prominent; one character faces an unfortunate fate, which may change if the trio stops the development of SR232. While the alternating time periods and the recruits’ trading first-person narration generate a brisk pace, there are perhaps too many story threads. Romance, for one, is fleeting and hardly affects the tale. Similarly, the time-traveling aspect isn’t always easy to follow. The characters often discuss timelines, as if Loganus and the recruits all have their own, which doesn’t seem to mesh with preventing a tragedy in the future. Nevertheless, Gauthier writes with panache, as when time-traveling Kevin tries to remain incognito in 2021: “I walked to the edge of the platform and noticed a lone fisherman in a flat bottom skiff with an electric lantern hanging out over the water. He reeled in a fish, unhooked it, and dropped it into his boat. But then he looked straight at me and the Dream Wheel.” The ending, considering all that unfolds, offers a surprising resolution.
Futuristic and historical plots collide in this engaging, if overstuffed, time-hopping tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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