A smart, absorbing, and inventive time-travel tale.
In this sci-fi debut, guardians of the time stream inhibit a physicist from completing his experiment, which leads to a catastrophic future event.
Caltech physicist Dr. Ezekiel “Zeke” Levine is on the verge of achieving absolute zero, but someone evidently stops him. His memory is initially fuzzy when a stranger leads him out of his lab and through a portal. This man, Ben, has brought Zeke to the Chronosphere, a place that’s “outside of time.” It’s here that chronologists monitor the time stream and try to amend calamities, like saving some—but not necessarily all—people from a 17th-century plague. It seems that a massive, potentially apocalyptic occurrence down the time stream is the eventual result of Zeke’s experiment. But removing the physicist from his timeline and destroying his notes haven’t prevented a future entropic effect: a glimpse ahead shows a galaxy that appears to be deteriorating. So Headley Grantham, head of the Council of Chronos, assigns Zeke the task of finding a way to rectify the entropy. As part of his training, Zeke joins the chronologists, including historian Dr. Siroush Isfahani, on a mission to the mid-1300s. This ultimately prompts Zeke’s hypothesis: the entropic effect may be caused by the chronologists’ contaminating the time stream, with their constant traveling putting time particles (or chronotons) in the wrong place. Most in the Chronosphere aren’t keen about Zeke’s notion. But when the chronologists realize another group may have its eye on them, they’ll have to face the possibility that the dismal future could very well be their fault. Tameron fills his book with several genuine surprises, from the future event the chronologists blame on Zeke to the introduction of Aurora Quinn, a woman in the 14th century who’s apparently versed in time traveling. Readers will surely detect similarities between this story and well-known works like Doctor Who and Star Trek. The author even acknowledges these for comic relief: Zeke jokingly calls the chronologists “Time Lords” and later quips, “Dammit, Jim…I’m a nerdy physicist not a master spy.” Nevertheless, Tameron injects his narrative with creativity even when tackling genre staples. There are playful references, for example, to the butterfly effect (traveling to a particular time period sparks a seemingly unrelated change centuries later) as well as the popular idea of going back in time to kill Hitler. Theoretical discussions are, of course, in abundance, and this provides the focus over sci-fi trademarks such as otherworldly tech (a scanning device merely resembles an iPhone). Scientific dialogue often includes terms common to the characters (for example, gluons and other particles) but perhaps not to readers. In a hilarious moment, Siroush stops Zeke from elucidating subatomic particles. “Yes, yes,” he assures the physicist. “I know what bosons are.” Still, all that discourse revolves around solving mysteries, which extend to Zeke’s hunting for details on time-travel pioneer Kamien Zdanie and maybe uncovering something nefarious at the Chronosphere. A gratifying ending leaves room for a continuation, and with an indication that this is Volume One, a series likely awaits.
A smart, absorbing, and inventive time-travel tale.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4996-1329-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2018
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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