A bold but mostly familiar SF yarn about an alien artifact.
In Helliesen’s SF novel, two death-defying activists come upon a mysterious object in the near-future Antarctic desert.
Thurgood Jane and his fiancee, Kii Brockheart, are professional daredevils. They’re willing to do just about anything—including strapping on experimental personal flight suits and rocketing through the stratosphere—as long as it helps them raise awareness for their various environmental causes. When Kii’s flight suit fails and she makes an emergency landing in Antarctica—which, in 2039, is a giant, sandstorm-swept desert—Thurgood immediately goes to rescue her. When he lands, he discovers a curious rectangle of metal embedded in a boulder in the middle of a meteorite field. Both are soon out of danger, but they make no mention of the object to anyone and sneak back to Antarctica a month later to investigate. They conclude it must be very old and potentially extraterrestrial. They recruit a pair of “ancient alien” researchers to help them make sense of the thing, and before long they find a metal door hidden in a nearby mountain. They succeed in getting the door open…only to discover that this might not have been the best course of action (especially given that they aren’t the only ones interested in whatever’s inside). The author’s prose is vivid, particularly when describing the book’s often arresting action sequences, as when Thurgood blasts through the atmosphere at 8,000 kph: “Even with the suit fabric stiffening and the exoskeleton joints locking to hold his extremities in place, and with shock absorbers between his body and the heat shield, it was still a wild ride. He felt like a rag doll in a tumble dryer as the shield first danced on top of, then bit deeply into the atmosphere.” Helliesen is less successful in developing hercharacters; the personalities are big but flat, and there is little interpersonal tension to sustain scenes. SF fans will enjoy the pulpy “mystery box” plot, but the emotional stakes may not be compelling enough to bring general readers back for the teased sequel.
A bold but mostly familiar SF yarn about an alien artifact.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Graabein Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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