An ambitious and gory series opener that somewhat bafflingly straddles sci-fi and metaphysics/religion.
In this debut futuristic novel, most of Earth’s degraded population retreats to virtual-reality limbo, with rogues, cannibals, and a few godlike beings competing for humanity’s destiny in the dangerous outdoors.
After the creation of free energy, cures for all diseases, and affluent income for everyone with no need for labor (drones accomplish it all), the world should be a Utopia. But “Energy Wars” killed billions and elevated to power a shadowy, rather untrustworthy, space-station–based savior called the Lord Judge, who molded the planet into a “Federation.” Now 90 percent of the survivors dwell in clustered “Hub” cities, which are practically ghost towns, as everyone atrophies indoors in mind, spirit, and body, plugged into virtual reality most of the time. The outside “Wilderness” has been deliberately abandoned to rebel primitivists, a more-than-human policing force, and a monstrous race of drug-mutated, prowling cannibal killers called the Wrynd (compared to zombies, they are actually in almost every respect orcs). And seemingly incarnating the Earth spirit Gaia, animals ranging from livestock to former pets savagely attack defenseless humans, incidents called Rages. Several linked, outsized characters who traverse the ominous landscape in the former American West—principally Navajo drifter Harley Nearwater, a legendary outlaw and casual killer—set the stage for a major paradigm shift. Davis launches his series with a tale that conjures familiar dystopian genre tropes but still invokes what one protagonist calls an “interestin’ world.” What happens in that realm is “interestin’ ” in long, rather tentative stretches but primarily sets up enigmas that may or may not be answered down the line. Early inklings of foreboding and menace turn into extravagant action scenes, as the Federation military battles Tolkien-esque hordes of Wrynd that bathe the Rocky Mountains in blood. Other characters appear on the scene, controlling elemental forces of nature, seeming more mystical than sci-fi. Harley morphs from an intriguing agent-of-chaos antihero into a more typical Shane-style cowboy loner with a soft spot for children and seniors. There are hints of Mormon underpinnings with the gradual introduction of the supernatural into what began as a sort of frontier cyberpunk story. “We’ve slipped from reality to fantasy, from science to wizardry,” observes one character after yet another cascade of death and special effects. Future volumes will have to address open-ended puzzles this outing sets up.
An ambitious and gory series opener that somewhat bafflingly straddles sci-fi and metaphysics/religion.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-8543-6
Page Count: 386
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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