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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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