The journey is great; the destination somewhat disappointing.
Political and personal dramas unfold at a traveling space hotel.
The Grand Abeona Hotel—essentially a cruise ship in space—trundles from planet to planet. It’s not nearly as glamorous as it used to be, but it’s a welcome refuge to regular guests and to staffers who have escaped poverty, military service, criminal prosecution, and/or the crushing fist of the autocratic government to make it their home. Now, their settled existences are on the verge of catastrophic change. The attendees of an academic conference held onboard every year, which is usually a boondoggle, are urgently tasked with decoding a mysterious message. Spies have sneaked onship in search of a mysterious figure known as the Lamplighter, who issues seditious dispatches about the 500-year-old Emperor and the corrupt aristocrats of his court. If the Lamplighter isn’t found by the time the ship exits deep space, imperial authorities will arrest the entire hotel staff. What is the message? Who and where is the Lamplighter? And is hotel manager Carl really as kind—and as oblivious—as he appears to be? Initially this looks like a cozy SF story about found family, set among the colorfully rendered staff and guests of a large establishment in the vein of many British period dramas. But the narrative rapidly turns toward thriller, and some of the secrets that these characters hold are very dark. That swerve is both intriguing and entertaining, but unfortunately, it doesn’t quite pay off. The resolution to the central conflict comes across as rushed, not appropriately cathartic, and doesn’t resolve much other than the immediate situation. It’s unclear whether this book is a stand-alone or the first in a series. If the former, the author leaves a great deal of plot threads and budding relationships dangling; if the latter, even the promise of future installments would not entirely compensate for these lacks. In particular, a more detailed backstory for the Lamplighter (in contrast to the beautifully detailed pasts of the other characters) would have been appreciated, especially as a large political crisis still looms.
The journey is great; the destination somewhat disappointing.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780756419301
Page Count: 304
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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