In Martin’s debut fantasy tale, warring states wage bloody battles in a parallel universe.
Earthlike planet Xahr, populated by pugnacious, medieval-type humans, is rocked by perpetual war between the continental powers of the Banthyk Union and the Kingdom of Sarkrea. The right-thinking residents of Banthyk ride above their swampy homeland on the backs of gigantic lizards called trazlixes. The Sarkreans—bad guys who have shaved heads—use a mineral called convesium to heal their wounds and perform other magical feats. A host of peculiarly named substances, creatures and people course through the book, though Martin helpfully includes a lengthy introduction and frequent asides to explain each strange new word in this strange new world. He’s a little too helpful, in fact, as the pedantic exposition impedes the narrative flow; the map at the beginning of the book and the glossary at the end would have sufficed. The story also trips with writing tics that detract from the author’s clever creations. Too often he indulges in passive verbs and weak constructions—“Determination was evident,” he flatly notes of a wounded fighter’s mindset—and he sprinkles the text with clunky phrasing and words. Even if not always serviceable, the writing seems salvageable. At times, the prose is even pungent and pithy, as with a description of the Banthyk swamps: “A familiar smell of dead and rotting animals and plants permeated the air as the striding lizards plunged through the marsh.” But the plot is overly simplistic and most of the cast are more like video game caricatures than real-life characters. Although the feuding warriors engage in plenty of action-packed battles—often dispatching one another in creatively gory ways—too few well-developed personalities emerge from the carnage, and the leading heroes and villains come across as wooden. Many of the pages given over to exposition would be more valuable if devoted to further developing the sketchy characters and plot.
Intriguing storylines, creatures and weapons, but the human component is lacking.Pub Date: April 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470015374
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION
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