Another cute but cloying novel-length inflation of a story. Oltion’s picaresque send-up of homemade spaceship stories from...
More farcical adventures in time and space with Allen Meisner, the “card-carrying mad” scientist from Abandon in Place (2000). In orbit above the Earth on the space shuttle Discovery, Meisner quietly tests what turns out to be an inexpensive hyperdrive device that can transport the shuttle at faster-than-light speeds. Shuttle pilot Judy Gallagher is shocked at first but then delighted to find it so easy to hop about the solar system. In an entire novel based on variations of the law of Unintended Consequences (i.e., no good deed can go unpunished), the blithe, optimistic, ditsy Meisner and the resourceful, heroic Gallagher leap from one cliffhanger to another, beginning with a hostile particle-beam blast that cripples the shuttle and makes reentry impossible, while, on board, a spy tries to capture the device for Mother Russia. Meisner outfoxes both the spy and the US military’s attempt to grab the device for its own nefarious uses by disseminating the plans over the Internet and then broadcasting them to the world via a communications satellite in the shuttle’s bay. Informed that she and Meisner have been tried as traitors and sentenced to death in absentia, Gallagher helps Meisner steal an escape pod from the space station. The two come down in Wyoming, where they are aided by construction worker Trent, his charming wife Donna, and even more charming Dale, a bank robber who helps them get the money to build a faster-than-light starship out of septic tank and other easily available parts and take off to make first contact with a species of intelligent butterflies, who grudgingly permit the humans to join the galactic Federation—provided they can resolve the idiotic conflicts on their own planet.
Another cute but cloying novel-length inflation of a story. Oltion’s picaresque send-up of homemade spaceship stories from the 1940s, like Meisner’s flip inventions, lacks substance and sense enough to fill these 400 pages.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87777-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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