A far-out, Flash-Gordon-on-hallucinogens SF adventure, reined in (slightly) by a whiplash twist ending.
A psychotherapist gathers a team to foil her brilliant father’s Earth-threatening schemes in Trotta’s SF novel.
In Chicago in the year 2041, Amanda is a neuropsychiatrist who keeps her career and location hidden due to her fear of her estranged father, Oswald, a power-mad inventor and technocrat with a supervillain lair in far-off Reykjavik, Iceland. Amanda has just recovered from a visionary near-death experience, giving her the spiritual motivation to assemble and train a gifted team of former patients to oppose her father. Oswald’s influential but below-the-radar company, The Firm, staffed by whole armies of brainwashed minions, has its hooks in a historic, high-profile NASA voyage to Jupiter’s moon Europa, seeking life under its frozen oceans. Amanda realizes this is a facade for Oswald’s true objectives—the harvesting of vast amounts of energy and the deployment of revolutionary space-travel propulsion. Neither bodes well for Earth, where Oswald’s hidden influence orchestrates war, assassination, religious hatred, and other mayhem. Amanda and her comrades infiltrate The Firm, and when their mission goes off the rails, they must undertake the incredible space voyage themselves. What starts as a semi-grounded tale of paranoia turns into a way-out fantastic journey, featuring surreal encounters with bizarre aliens and environments: “Amanda saw the population of what was likely an entire Pleiadian city floating above sea-level while sitting down with arms outstretched, all with closed eyes and sharing the same frequency of peace.” The sadistic Oswald functions as a hissable villain as a plethora of perils proliferate in vintage-pulps fashion (romance is utterly absent). A climactic narrative twist compels the reader to rethink all that has gone before and to recontextualize much of the more over-the-top material. The open ending portends sequels. Scattered black-and-white comic-book-style illustrations (mostly character portraits) by de Almeida and Polonia punctuate the episodic narrative.
A far-out, Flash-Gordon-on-hallucinogens SF adventure, reined in (slightly) by a whiplash twist ending.Pub Date: July 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798850914349
Page Count: 477
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2023
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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