Benford—here, as always, at his best when portraying scientists discussing ideas and hammering out hypotheses—offers up some...
Sequel to The Martian Race (1999), in which scientists Julia Barth and her Russian-accented husband, Viktor, pioneered Mars and discovered life, the vast, anaerobic, enigmatic Marsmat.
Twenty years later, Viktor’s accent has not improved, but with colonization in full swing, Julia and Viktor ponder the Marsmat’s odd properties. Somehow, its vast, subterranean, far-flung parts can juggle magnetic fields, maybe in an attempt to communicate; it might even be intelligent! Mission sponsor John Axelrod’s persistent efforts to exploit commercial opportunities, such as the Mars Effect, Julia and Viktor’s unexplained youthfulness, remain a minor annoyance. Meanwhile, an expedition to Pluto to investigate that planet’s inexplicable (and relative) warm-up (it’s still utterly frigid), captained by Shanna, Axelrod’s prickly, headstrong daughter, has discovered life. Subsisting on chemical and electromagnetic energies, the huge, blimplike, intelligent zand—with whom Shanna can communicate, thanks to the miraculous, near-intelligent, universal-translator software called Wiseguy—didn’t evolve on Pluto. Moreover, the zand fear attack from the mysterious and deadly Darksiders. Julia and Viktor, sent in a state-of-the-art fusion-powered spaceship to assist, plunge into the usual rivalries, jealousies, and clashes of ideas and approaches. They do discover that the Darksiders are machines that arrive on huge snowballs called “iceteroids,” steered in from the Oort cloud. They decide to take both theirs and Shanna’s ships out to investigate—and precipitate the first interplanetary war.
Benford—here, as always, at his best when portraying scientists discussing ideas and hammering out hypotheses—offers up some absorbing scientific speculations, but stretches them to utterly far-fetched extremes.Pub Date: March 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53058-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an...
Frodo-heads rejoice: from the Tolkien factory comes a foundational story a century in the making, one yarn to rule them all.
“I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in frustration to his publisher. “But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.” The story of Beren, a mortal human, and Lúthien, an immortal elf, resonates throughout the corpus of Tolkien’s work; born while Tolkien was shaking off the horrors of combat in World War I, it figures in The Silmarillion, the first of the major posthumous books, and in other of the Middle-earth books, to say nothing of The Lord of the Rings itself, when Aragorn sings of the fraught love between the two legendary figures. As reconstructed here and presented whole, the saga adds back story to much of LOTR: it explains the mistrust of Treebeard and the other forest denizens for the world of men, and it provides a foreshadowing for the whole of the canonical Rings trilogy, since it describes a kind of ur-Saruman who lusts for both power and magical jewels, setting off a chain of events that implicates Orcs, dragons, humans, elves, and all manner of other beings. Some of the tale here is in verse, done in a kind of Tennyson-esque meter: “Then Sauron laughed aloud. ‘Thou base, / thou cringing worm! Stand up, / and hear me! And now drink the cup / that I have sweetly blent for thee!' " Sweetly blent indeed. Other moments are worthy of Mikhail Bulgakov, such as Tolkien’s conjuring of giant malevolent cats, their “eyes glowing like green lamps or red or yellow where Tevildo’s thanes sat waving and lashing their beautiful tails,” and of Tennyson himself, as when Beren tells how for Lúthien’s love “he must essay the burning waste, / and doubtless death and torment taste.”
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an epic cycle that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-79182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
Readers won’t be able to put down this dark and riveting tale of power and revenge.
Victor Vale has died twice—and it’s not getting any easier.
Five years ago, after the bloody battle that ended with Victor dead and his former friend Eli imprisoned, Sydney Clarke used her power to bring Victor back. But for ExtraOrdinary people like Victor, Sydney’s resurrection power comes at a price. Now Victor is racing against time to figure out how to repair the damage death has done to him—and struggling to hold his weird little makeshift family—made up of an ex-con, a former soldier, and a girl who can raise the dead—together even though he’s falling apart. Meanwhile, a new EO is rising in the town of Merit. Marcella Riggins isn’t the type to take murder lying down, and she’s come back from death with only one thought in her mind: ruin. She’ll start with her husband, who killed her when she confronted him over his infidelity, but she won’t stop there. Five years may have passed since the events of Vicious (2013), the first book in Schwab’s (A Conjuring of Light, 2017, etc.) Villains series, but her superpowered characters haven’t exactly used that time to relax. The tension in this sequel starts high and keeps ratcheting higher, as Victor’s grip on his power starts slipping and the body count starts rising. Victor and his friends and enemies are a fascinating group of complicated characters, and the utterly ruthless Marcella is a great addition to the mix.
Readers won’t be able to put down this dark and riveting tale of power and revenge.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8752-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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