Skimps on nuance in favor of plot density, but it’s a perceptive, gratifying saga.
In Burns’ debut sci-fi tale, the bond between a human and an alien begets a shaky intergalactic alliance, precipitating acclimation for some and resistance from others.
Eighty-two-year-old widower Jeremy Blunt, with a failing heart, is awaiting his life’s end in California. He helps a bound figure, whom someone dumped from an unfamiliar hovering craft. She’s Small Snow Flower of the birdlike Rynn beings, but Jeremy, unable to pronounce her name in the chirping alien language, calls her Kasumi. She adopts the name, and the two converse thanks to Kasumi’s Torque, a multipurpose device worn around the neck. She plans to regain her ship, lost to mutiny, and kung fu grand master Jeremy agrees to train her with help from granddaughter Mel. In exchange, Kasumi takes Mel, now her core sister (wife, essentially), back to her home planet, Nest. The two return to Earth later with others on a trade mission—the Rynn have technology and a miracle drug to offer. Some Americans fiercely reject the aliens, leading the U.S. to split into feuding coalitions. But there are worse extraterrestrials, like the Polig-Grug, which consider Rynn—and most likely humans, too—a food source. Burns jam-packs so much into this story that it’s virtually a series. Provocative themes abound. A Rynn core, similar to relationships in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, comprises at least three lovers of varying male/female combinations. The newly formed Christian States of America reintroduces slavery. There’s likewise an overt but welcome message of acceptance. For example, altruistic human Jeremy, through Kasumi’s eyes, is strange at first and possibly dangerous, but characters throughout learn that not all unknown souls are enemies. The plot’s breakneck pace may be too fast; potentially-inciting bits are expedited, like Kasumi and Mel’s relationship, while others are bypassed altogether (disappointingly, there are no scenes on Nest). Regardless, readers will surely look forward to more interplanetary interactions in probable sequels.
Skimps on nuance in favor of plot density, but it’s a perceptive, gratifying saga.Pub Date: July 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4789-7
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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