Imaginative high-stakes SF breathes fresh life into the alien-first-contact genre.
In Tabor’s SF novel, a NASA expedition to the edge of the solar system encounters a long-hibernating alien.
In the year 2112, a NASA expedition (a dangerously cut-rate, low-budget one, it turns out) has sent volunteers to explore deep space, with little or no chance of return. The crew, led by Commander Jerry Jerrison, is on the edge of Pluto’s orbit when they make an epochal discovery: a fantastically advanced, shape-shifting alien spaceship, guided by an artificial intelligence and harboring one hibernating occupant, a being named Muni. He is a Morgi, a long-lived galactic species with a strongly acquisition-based socio-economic culture. Resembling large slugs with taloned wings and quadruple eyes, Morgi have inherent predator instincts—the initial contact (while Muni is still awakening) results in the shocking devouring of an astronaut. After that faux pas, the creature must employ skillfully spun falsehoods and half-truths to explain himself and win Jerrison’s trust. Muni explains that his near-destitute Green Hill Clan took a risk and dared to explore two distant star systems, hoping to annex them for their survival and self-aggrandizement. One held a promising ice age planet, Earth. But Muni did not imagine its Cro-Magnon population evolving over millennia into an intelligent, spacefaring civilization—something no Morgi had yet encountered. Muni faces the erasure of his tribe (and the extermination of the human race) by ambitious rival clans unless a strictly formal Morgi “ownership ritual” tradition is followed in full cooperation with the humans. But how can humankind submit to the will of this (not entirely honest) alien? The plot contains some credulity-stretching coincidences and fortuitous turns of fate, nicely blended with canny depictions of diplomacy, strategy, and flimflammery. The alien biology and culture (and how they drive each other) are well thought out. Readers will enjoy the sidelong jabs at human-style colonial imperialism and realpolitik (“Doctor Johnson, I have a question for you. Which is better, a great peace supported by a lie, or a massacre justified by the truth?”). The breathless wrap-up would seem to indicate that the story is a stand-alone, but an epilogue points to a sequel.
Imaginative high-stakes SF breathes fresh life into the alien-first-contact genre.Pub Date: July 20, 2022
ISBN: 9798201463731
Page Count: 386
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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