Well-calibrated apocalyptic SF that smartly plays on Covid-19-era angst.
In Gauthier’s novel, when a tiny black hole enters our solar system, the destructive consequences for Earth quickly become frighteningly apparent.
In the cloistered astronomy department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Patrice Gailart is first among widespread global observers to witness via telescope the distortion and destruction of Pluto and its moon. The cause: a miniature black hole traveling through the solar system. The thrill of discovery of this rare phenomenon is short-lived as the realization dawns that the black hole—dubbed Dragon’s Eye, after an advanced Chinese telescope that captures the best images—is zooming toward the central planets and will therefore affect Earth. (“All our tectonic plates could shift at the same time. Hundreds if not thousands of earthquakes could occur within hours of each other.”) Patrice and her peers warn government authorities, only to find a coverup already implemented in the name of “national security.” At the same time, ongoing protests over health care policy have filled the streets with protesters; when Patrice takes the Dragon’s Eye crisis public, hotheads and cynics accuse her of promulgating a “fake news” diversion. Meanwhile, government wonks posit that a black hole might be foiled by atomic missiles. Soon, Patrice and her associates need Secret Service guards to protect them against threats as precious hours pass and the Dragon’s Eye accelerates. Gauthier’s novel should sate fans of Michael Crichton’s work and other cosmic-disaster standouts like Eater (2000), Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), and When Worlds Collide (1933). This iteration is distinctively colored by the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown of 2019–20 and its attendant anti-science, mob-mentality pushback; the author depicts his brainy hero’s best-intentioned warnings as being mischaracterized by a biased media and disbelieved by politically motivated screwballs. There is a blend of real-life institutions and figures (including Fox News and Barack Obama) with fictional ones (like the embattled, not-as-dumb-as-he-seems president Lane Everston, party affiliation unknown), and Gauthier even throws a sexy romance into the mix. Though readable as a standalone story, this volume has ties to the metaphysically inclined Two Spirit series from the same author.
Well-calibrated apocalyptic SF that smartly plays on Covid-19-era angst.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781732082458
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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