A dense, winding tale for serious genre aficionados.
Soldiers listen to a giant’s epic tale in Dowdeswell’s military SF novel.
In the opening pages of this novel, a “mech” named Mano transforms into a roving military machine, his skin ripping apart to enter “battle mode.” He, alongside his human partner, Day, is in search of an intruder who eventually reveals herself as a giant with an important story to tell—one that’s “intertwined with the end of the war and the beginning of the new era, and also with the lives of the greatest of all waxen.” The Waxen, the reader soon learns, are super-soldiers who undergo a “wax transformation” that makes their skin as tough as armor and causes them to grow larger and stronger. To avoid growing too large, the Waxen must occasionally bathe, and they can never grow taller than their leader, Wax Adoor, colloquially known as “Waxman.” After establishing the ground rules of the world and its people, the giant’s story oscillates between the past and the present, with Day and Mano occasionally interrupting the tale to ask questions. Over time, the true subject of the nested story emerges: a conflicted Waxen soldier named Kayanai Blu who slowly discovers that the great Waxen leader is not all he seems to be. The cast of characters quickly expands, with sometimes-convoluted shifting allegiances. This SF novel’s ambitious scope is commendable. the execution sometimes falters under the weight of its complexity. At one point, Day mentions finding the giant’s tale too confusing to follow, and the reader might agree, with its stories within stories and dense thicket of invented terms; a typical passage reads, “They won’t stand a chance if Kolorov’son’s fleet makes it to Gengaru. The Shrie Shrie will return, and they will kill us all.” That said, those who are willing to navigate its intricate plotting and engage with its heavy jargon will find many pleasures in the novel’s richly described worlds.
A dense, winding tale for serious genre aficionados.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781039159723
Page Count: 240
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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