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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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