This is a rollicking adventure with religious, philosophical, and technological overtones; for science fiction die-hards.
When a dimension-hopping spacecraft ventures beyond the boundaries of the universe, literally ending up nowhere, strange and disturbing events play havoc with it.
Carr (Messages, 2013, etc.) has a real talent for constructing living, breathing characters: Cermeno, a Queeg-like captain with a questionable past who, through nepotism, has bumped De Vegas, a more competent officer, to second-in-command; Jervis, a womanizing reporter; Teal, a drunken priest; and Nunn, a disfigured loner. Add to this a pedophile and a crew with a surfeit of jealousies, gripes, and motives; toss them all aboard untested space-faring technology heading off into the unknown and….What could go wrong? After a tantalizing, action-filled prologue, Carr takes time to establish these volatile characters. He cleverly uses a mission press conference to quickly introduce the cast before sending them on their way. The craft, aptly named the Santa Maria, makes use of a new technology harnessing the science behind supernatural phenomenon such as a poltergeist, which are caused by dimensional glitches. It works flawlessly on the way. Once the ship leaves the universe for a perfect vacuum, however, all hell breaks loose. In a quantum nothingness where anything can happen, everything does, from personal demons come to life to interdimensional kidnappings. As systems fail, the crew dwindles, and survivors must overcome one impossibility after another. Part sci-fi, part psychological drama, part zombie apocalypse, the thrillfest starts early and continues till the end. The author slowly showcases his cast, lighting them from different angles. Nunn is first given her own extended scene interacting with her cat and Wilson, the computer she designed. But Carr can also sum up a character like Cermeno in a few brush strokes: “his slightly self-deprecating humor—a tactic with which he was not totally comfortable but that his consultants assured him would be good for his image.”
This is a rollicking adventure with religious, philosophical, and technological overtones; for science fiction die-hards.Pub Date: May 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-43602-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Premonition Media
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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