Latest in a sudden flurry of novels about Mars: a near-future nuts-and-bolts account of humanity's first exploration of the red planet, comparable with Ben Bova's recent Mars. Sam Houston Kelligan, son of a wealthy Texas oil baron, has one ambition: to reach Mars. But he and the other candidates hoping to be selected to crew Ares, the first colony ship, must first race against each other on the moon in a deadly game to test their survival capabilities. Robot landers, however, bringing back samples of Martian dust, have returned contaminated with a sort of pre-life infective molecule—to which humans prove susceptible. And throughout the eventual Mars voyage, problems multiply. Two of the crew vote to do a quick scientific survey, then dash for Earth without landing. Kelligan, meanwhile, along with unrequited love Jayne, crashes on Mars and appears to be lost. The rebellious pair jettison equipment vital to the colony's survival, then callously flee, only to be lost in space. Kelligan and the survivors set up housekeeping on Mars, but two of them succumb to the dust-virus. The only hope is for Kelligan to attempt to reach Earth in the expedition's only remaining spacecraft. As Kelligan takes off, the Mars project back on Earth is deliberately bankrupted and then bought up by Kelligan's boyhood rival, who thus has powerful reasons to conceal the truth when Kelligan, barely alive, makes it back to Earth. Solid plotting, restrained melodrama, persuasive Martian ambience: another winning performance from the grandmasterly author of, most recently, Mazeway (1990).
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-85154-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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 new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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