A tender yet action-packed sci-fi novel.
Jabali’s (UNLV’s Rebel Yell, 2011, etc.) stirring sci-fi novel presents a protagonist who thinks he’s incapable of comprehending human emotions—until he makes friends with a young girl named Alice.
As the brilliant, insane Dr. Vincent Divol draws close to death, he puts the finishing touches on Android 13V, whose sole purpose is to rescue and protect his great-granddaughter, 12-year-old Alice. It’s not an easy task, as the android must navigate the dangers of a post-apocalyptic dystopia ruled by bands of violent gangs to save Alice from a brothel, and he then must carry her safely through a landscape littered with mutants, hostile gang members and radiation-withered forests to get to Dr. Divol’s old estate. Armed with superhuman computing powers (and the ability to kill almost instantly), Android 13V is well-suited to the rescue mission. But he finds it much more challenging to take care of Alice’s educational, physical and emotional needs after they arrive at the mansion. In spite of his computational brilliance, the logical android is predictably unable to understand Alice’s seemingly irrational desires to celebrate holidays and spare the lives of hostile civilians asking for water. The relationship that develops between them—she calls him “Andy”—soon proves beneficial for both of them; Alice gains some of Andy’s wisdom, and Andy develops an unlikely emotional affinity for the girl entrusted to his care. Alice’s doe-eyed innocence and devotion to her dolls may strike readers as unconvincing in a young woman who once lived in a violent brothel, and her inability to understand Andy’s elevated vocabulary is overplayed in a series of dull, one-sided conversations. However, their blossoming friendship lends the novel a much-needed touch of humanity. The novel provides intriguing contrasts: Cold, computational logic conflicts with human volatility, and the preciousness of Alice and Andy’s friendship is countered by gritty narrations of fast-paced violence. The result is a satisfyingly balanced novel that will likely leave genre fans hungering for more.
A tender yet action-packed sci-fi novel.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483402802
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2013
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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