A wild metaphysical adventure that may leave readers scratching their heads.
In Shuford’s sci-fi novel, a brilliant physics major’s breakthrough may explain the fracturing reality of a housewife on the run from her former life.
No matter what her doctor husband says, Katherine Jameson feels an inexplicable sense of wrongness. It may have started small—losing track of time—but it quickly escalates to major rifts in her world, as when a meteorite crater on the beach suddenly disappears. Due to her husband’s increasingly hostile, controlling nature, Katherine is compelled to run for her life, only to slip out of control. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Billy Reltin has just started college, where he’s bombarded with new experiences that he’s unprepared for, despite his scientific brilliance. The previous star physics student is hostile, Billy’s attractive friend has an interest in mind-expanding substances, and Billy has the feeling that he’s very close to some conceptual breakthrough—a “quantum loophole” that might just explain Katherine’s fractured reality. Shuford’s novel sits firmly within the lineage of metaphysical, reality-questioning sci-fi, from Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. However, while the premise is intriguing, this adventure doesn’t quite engage readers since its metaphysical bent often takes attention away from character development. When Katherine has mixed thoughts about her mother (aka the “Thought Police”) or when Billy faces the problem of choosing a seat in class, Shuford’s characters are identifiable and sympathetic; but when characters occasionally turn out to be manifestations of the subconscious or derived from another layer of reality, readers might yearn for more attention paid to the real characters’ dilemmas and choices. Instead, Shuford explains the nine circles of reality via his characters’ lecturing one another and through fictional encyclopedia entries. Similarly, a novel with the subtitle “Adventures Across Conflicting Realities” may have a thematic reason for reminding readers that they’re reading a book—i.e., “that is a story not contained in the current scenario”—but such comments interrupt the reading process. Torn between Katherine’s adventure and Billy’s metaphysical discovery, the novel doesn’t excel at either.
A wild metaphysical adventure that may leave readers scratching their heads.Pub Date: May 26, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2013
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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