Science fiction about the far future’s powerful military families, a sequel to Moon’s Once a Hero (1997). As Lt. Esmay Suiza’she of the seriously bad hair and knack for getting into hot water—joins her officer training course, she’s requested to nursemaid the talented but wayward civilian Brun Meager, daughter of Lord Thornbuckle, the Familias Regnant’s head honcho. Brun wants to party, but Esmay’s taking double classes—and when the red-hot Brun starts flirting with Esmay’s beloved, Barin Serrano, the emotionally inexperienced Esmay explodes and bawls Brun out. Unfortunately, the media record the scene and Esmay finds herself vilified, reprimanded, and shunted off to the unglamorous Search & Rescue branch of the Fleet. Worse, Thornbuckle blames Esmay for Brun’s plight, and she breaks up with Barin after accusing him of sleeping with Brun (he didn’t). In a huff, Brun decides to tour her family’s holdings in space, but makes the mistake of detouring through the system where the New Texas Godfearing Militia has just seized a freighter carrying illicit arms. The Militia consists of fascist religious crazies who kidnap and enslave women and children. They grab Brun, then beat, rape, and impregnate her, and murder everybody else. Esmay, executive officer aboard an SAR investigating vessel, finds debris and grisly remains, but it’s a long time before she can track the crazies to their home planet. Poor Brun, meanwhile, gives birth to twins (for whom she feels nothing) and escapes just as Fleet’s rescue gets under way. Esmay, back in favor after some manipulating by senior members of the Serrano clan (she finally gets a good haircut, too), gets in on the action—and, of course, Barin still loves her. Great female characters, vigorous plotting, a solid military-family backdrop, but not enough action to keep everyone on board.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-57777-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Baen
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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 ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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