Despite lackluster dialogue, this book expertly manages a sci-fi conceit that is as bizarre as it is ultimately plausible.
Scientists using suspicious technology may be seeking to trigger an apocalypse in this novel from debut author Ormziar.
A theologian named Hast wakes up in 2060 from a striking nightmare. Having envisioned a day of judgment for mankind, he cannot easily shake the images. As he comments to his wife, “Doomsday is perhaps on its way” after all. A week ago, “he had read a news article where scientists were warning people that a deadly meteor was heading toward earth, and it was set to hit it by 2068.” Days after his dream, Hast is contacted by Interpol agent Mark Robinson. Working on a tip that “someone was trying to play the role of God and was planning to control everyone’s mind,” Mark finds himself examining a large scientific project called The New ARK. TNARK, as the endeavor is known, is ostensibly engaged in the process of using “genetic engineering to modify human genes in order to create a super organism.” There are, however, suspicions that something much more sinister is at play. When, during Mark’s investigation into mind control, he comes across Hast’s writings on the subject as well as his work on end-of-days prophecies, Mark realizes that he might be looking for the Antichrist. So begins an unlikely alliance that seeks to thwart a scientific attempt at world domination. Making use of “3D bio-printing technology” and other near-future (and present-day) advancements, the scenario delivers its share of wild, albeit not too wild, ideas. The result is an overall eeriness that would not exist in a more fantastical premise. Dialogue tends to be obvious, as when Mark first meets Hast and informs him that he seems to “have an impressive knowledge about the history of religions, especially Abrahamic faiths.” Nevertheless, at under 300 pages, the book moves quickly and encompasses topics ranging from the duality of Zoroastrianism to “blue light brain control.” As strange as such a convergence may initially seem, it results in an ambitious narrative that never lacks in fatalistic intrigue.
Despite lackluster dialogue, this book expertly manages a sci-fi conceit that is as bizarre as it is ultimately plausible.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5172-2388-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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