Good fun all around. Now on to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter....
“What a world,” says a character in this lively old-school sci-fi anthology. “It’s like a circle in Dante’s hell.”
Thronemaster Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) and anthologist/editor Dozois (Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, 2002, etc.) plumb a promising premise: Given that science now tells us the humanoid extraterrestrials of classic sci-fi couldn’t really live on the methane and ammonia fumes of the actual planet, let’s return to the glory days of Burroughs, Bradbury, Brackett and company (and that’s just the B’s) and “rekindle the wonderful, gorgeously colored dream of Old Venus.” That old world presupposes an ocean populated by all kinds of wondrous dreams and structures; it implicates unimaginably ancient civilizations that unmake themselves, inexplicably disassembling their famed cities: “Where once was Twi-land,” Michael Cassutt writes in a nicely eldritch yarn that would have done Lovecraft proud, “would now be Noon, or Nightside.” The earthlings who come to Venus would be different from the ones we know, of course; Paul McAuley depicts a scenario in which the USSR and the U.S. are still bitter rivals in space, and moreover, he tells that tale from the Russian point of view: “You know there was no American plot. You know that the miners became infected with something that drove them crazy. You know the survivors are hiding, like the poor man up in the crane.” The people who come to Venus, naturally, find ways to mate with the locals, which fuels yarns propelled by beings of mixed heritage, a timely matter on Earth as well. The strategy of putting modern writers to work on old-fashioned themes could go south in all kinds of ways, but all the participants acquit themselves well, if sometimes, as with the opening to Tobias S. Buckell’s “Pale Blue Memories,” with a hint of tongue in cheek: “I grabbed the arms of my acceleration chair as we spun, our silver bullet of a rocket ship vomiting debris and air into the cold night of Venus’s stratosphere.”
Good fun all around. Now on to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter....Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53728-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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