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
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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