A brisk, if occasionally uneven, yarn that will still appeal to old and young space-action fans.
A courier takes on more than she bargained for when she accepts a gig transporting an alien relic through hostile space in Matiasz’s SF novel.
In a spacegoing future, earthlings are regarded by various alien species as violent, verminous upstarts whose greed ruined their home world and botched attempts to terraform Mars and Venus. Many feel that Homo sapiens, or “Gaians,” as they’re known, have no right to be zooming among the stars; nonetheless, many Gaians work throughout the galaxy as mercenaries and criminals. Stacey Jones, a Gaian, grew up in a Mars colony and self-identifies as a proud, socialist Martian, but despite her politics, her services as a transport-courier are still for sale. Desperate for cash, she takes a seemingly easy assignment to ferry an ancient artifact to Kapala, a planet maintained as a sort of shrine to the mysterious Progenitor civilization, which seeded life throughout the cosmos. The cuplike item, called a “sangrael,” turns out to be an archetypal relic that’s featured in numerous Terran legends, including that of the Holy Grail, but its curator—the mysterious part-cyborg Medea—assures Stacey that the object is harmless on its own. However, heavily armed attackers from all over known space (including other Gaians) soon converge on the tiny expedition. What kind of task has she really taken on? Matiasz delivers a flighty space-opera adventure in a compact package that has the feel of a teen-oriented chapter book or comic-book tale—a feeling that’s further cemented by the inclusion of Hunt’s flavorful black-and-white illustrations. It offers shoutouts to such SF pioneers as Larry Niven, Olaf Stapledon, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs. The text, narrated by the determined Stacey, packs a lot of information into a small space—it’s a virtual singularity, one might say—but it doesn’t stop it from snapping into action-packed fight scenes in the blink of an eye. There’s not a lot of character development, though, and an asteroid-field of subplots remains in orbit at the end.
A brisk, if occasionally uneven, yarn that will still appeal to old and young space-action fans.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 81
Publisher: 62 Mile Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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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