Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.
The third and presumably final installment about a hard-science space odyssey whose purpose is to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy.
Previously, our starship encountered the Bowl, a vast, steerable object that wanders space capturing and enslaving alien species to occupy its unimaginably huge living space. Having wrestled the Bowl's birdlike boss species to a standstill in the sequel, Captain Redwing and crew planted a thriving colony there. Now, the starship finally attains its original destination, Glory, a planetary system whose orbital dynamics prove artificially engineered and enormously more complex than remote surveillance indicated. The Bowl, it emerges, directed by ancient, patient alien Ice Minds, has met the Glory system's controlling intelligences before—and they are not best buds. Like its predecessors, this adventure is clotted with technical detail (what was it Twain said about never letting the facts get in the way of a good story?), nearly all of it skippable. Biologists Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash (they're an item) visit the alien planets and encounter a parade of mind-bogglingly implausible critters, some lethal, some highly intelligent, some merely ridiculous, in a narrative peppered with borrowings, often annoying, from Brian Aldiss' classic Hothouse (1962). Redwing, meanwhile, heads for a gigantic living spaceship and a meeting with Glory's weird head honcho; this offers the authors scope to write impressive exchanges wherein resourceful humans augmented by AI are not altogether overmatched.
Full of ideas and often intriguing, if difficult—so, just about worth the effort.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9240-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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 intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.
In the not-too-distant future, a marine biologist specializing in cephalopod intelligence discovers a species of octopus with astonishing language skills—research that a giant corporation wants to monetize.
Dr. Ha Nguyen is so amazed by her findings that she's willing to submit herself to the odious tactics of the big tech company, which controls the Vietnamese island where the octopuses dwell. Having "resettled" the population of the Con Dao Archipelago, the company not only will kill any outsiders who attempt to set foot there, but also has ordered Ha's death should she attempt to leave. Not that she has any inclination to do so. Once exposed to the octopuses, she is determined to uncover the great mysteries of extrahuman intelligence. In spite of their hostile reputation, these are creatures of transcendent beauty, communicating through glowing visual symbols that move on their skin in complex patterns and sequences. In a world of robot-operated slave ships, bee-size drones, and AI automonks with three-fingered hands and light receptors for pupils, her main ally is Evrim, the world's first and possibly last true android, which not only thinks like a human being, but also believes it is conscious. Ha's benefactor and adversary is Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, the Icelandic brains of the corporation, whose ultimate goal is to create a mind "wiped clean of its limitations." A prolific writer of SF stories making his debut as a novelist, Nayler maintains a cool, cerebral tone that matches up with the story's eerie underpinnings. Less an SF adventure than a meditation on consciousness and self-awareness, the limitations of human language, and the reasons for those limitations, the novel teaches as it engages.
An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60595-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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