Hard to imagine much of an audience outside math brainiacs and Egan enthusiasts.
Egan (The Arrows of Time, 2014, etc.) specializes in inventing seriously strange worlds; this one might well be his weirdest yet.
Seth, a Walker, like all his kind can only orient his body in an east-west direction and is blind to what lies north or south. Inside his skull lives Theo, a cylindrical symbiont called a Sider, who projects infrasound pulses north and south and observes the reflections. They can speak to each other and see what the other sees. Like all living things here, they and their fellows must migrate perpetually to follow their sun’s bizarre orbit and the wobbling habitable zone it generates. What? Well, our universe consists of three space dimensions and one of time; this world has two space dimensions and two of time, so instead of a sphere they’re on a hyperboloid. This isn’t the half of it; water, for instance, runs up any slope of less than 45 degrees. The city where they live, Baharabad, must constantly be disassembled at one extreme and reassembled at the other (though we never get to see this happening). Seth and Theo are surveyors, scouting ahead to map a safe path for the migration. But then their expedition encounters a seemingly bottomless, boundless chasm. All this doesn’t sound too bad in synopsis. The problem is, it’s counterintuitive, so downright odd that it’s impossible to visualize the inhabitants, their surroundings, or what’s going on. Knowing what the mathematical justification is doesn’t help. There are plenty of other issues too. How did Walkers and Siders survive independently, as it seems they did, before becoming symbionts? Why would Walkers have such convenient holes in their skulls? It’s not even particularly original: back in 1974 Christopher Priest envisioned something similar (Inverted World) with much greater success.
Hard to imagine much of an audience outside math brainiacs and Egan enthusiasts.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59780-892-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Night Shade
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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