An entertaining, amusing, and relatable SF tale with diverse characters.
In this SF novel, a lonely interplanetary trash collector survives a crisis in outer space and finds unusual new friends.
Feckless 30-something Kenyan Enoch Owusu, an interstellar trash collector, has just received several sudden, heavy blows in his personal life—his parents died; his girlfriend deserted him; and his best friend and partner left for a different job in quick succession. The year is 2742, and after centuries of wars and disasters, humans have colonized Mars, the moon, and Europa, all of which are governed by a military-style regime called SysNav. The Church of All Faiths, a new religion, believes that Earth received an alien signal centuries ago and expects the extraterrestrials to return and benefit humankind. Feeling out of shape, sad, alone, and powerless, Enoch is picking up space debris with a basic artificial intelligence system as his only companion when he detects a distress signal of unknown origin. His good-hearted decision to go check it out begins a series of surprising adventures that fulfill the promise of the subtitle. Watt’s narrative tone is delightfully snarky, especially in the 68 footnotes that explain various details of future history and daily life in a spaceship. Pithy, humorous descriptions vividly bring the setting and characters to life. The narrative is original and full of apt observations, including “Enoch tried to walk as sarcastically as he could...just to show them he wasn’t scared,” and “Finding a bunch of black ships in a black background of space was like one of those puzzles where you had to find the stripy shirt guy in the environment full of stripy things.” Enoch’s personal journey from pathetic basket case to brave, open-minded, and confident man is satisfying and relatable. The other characters are also intriguing and well drawn. The scientific explanations of “slip drive,” a method of fast space travel, seem plausible enough not to get in the way of the story. The ending leaves many questions unanswered, making readers hope for a sequel. Overall, this novel is a fun read that successfully combines a humane sensibility, a classic adventure story, and humor.
An entertaining, amusing, and relatable SF tale with diverse characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2022
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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