Vivid perils and well-realized characters and concepts fuel a space/time voyage.
Four couples embarking on a one-way starship expedition aim to colonize a distant world—if their own psychoses and betrayals don’t kill them first.
A European project on a future Earth—beset by disasters and in danger of becoming uninhabitable—institutes a one-way, deep-space mission. Filled with automated systems, durable robots (humanoid and nonhumanoid), and hibernation capsules, an array of Repopulation, Expansion, Annexation Program ships is dispatched from the solar system, each headed for potentially habitable, faraway worlds. Aboard REAP crafts are couples of diverse ethnicities, backgrounds, and science expertise, selected to breed and raise descendants in new outposts to preserve the human race. But the dark sides of the voyagers emerge early as REAP No. 23 launches. A high-caste Hindu genius turns out to be a sociopath who bribed his way on to the crew (“He used his broad smile and a transformed happy face frequently, as a tool, as a weapon, as a distraction”). His faithless trophy wife is having an affair with the cheerful Chinese-American captain. Another man, moody and alienated, starts giving in to the worst Islamic fundamentalist traits in his Persian ancestry. As Earth recedes forever, lust and selfish mania threaten the onboard minisociety with doom before a fraction of the journey is even completed. Perry, who wrote Between Love and Money (2007) as Martin Filson, spins a taut, resonant tale based on one of the most familiar tropes in sci-fi. The author tightens the screws of claustrophobia and suspense with aplomb and well-conceived characterizations, which are concerned just as much with matters of emotion (maybe more so) as with circuitry and astrophysics. When the narrative crosscuts to Earth, it turns into another, less urgent story entirely. The chronicle leapfrogs over thousands of tumultuous years—thanks to Einstein’s theory of relativity—while nations rise and decay and humanity loses, regains, and loses again concrete memories of REAP and its meaning. The author provides an afterword detailing the future history inferred in the plotline, and it leaves readers with a sense that much material remains to be mined from the rich universe Perry has persuasively imagined. But readers should come away satisfied with this 18,000-year journey all the same.
Vivid perils and well-realized characters and concepts fuel a space/time voyage.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-2742-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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