A trilogy of exuberant and lucid tales that exhibits a fear of the future, regardless of the time period.
In this sci-fi series, an alien species secretly on Earth tries to prevent humanity’s extinction.
This collection opens with The Chaos Machine, which describes freight haulers from the planet Shoomar landing on an unknown world in 5342 B.C.E. Their ship, capable of traversing the space-time continuum, experienced a “Bad Jump” that has left crew members stranded on Earth. Fortunately, they can live comfortably on the planet, which is comparable to Shoomar. But according to projections from the ship’s navigational system, earthlings will be wiped out in a thousand years, and the Shoomarans want to ensure that doesn’t happen. Millennia later, in the present day, California billionaire Allen Brookstone mysteriously vanishes. He’s been taken by an eccentric group with advanced technology, including the Chaos Machine, which has predicted the imminent end of the world. The band needs Allen’s assistance in stopping the apocalyptic event. Second Contact takes place in “5342 AB,” when Cassiopeia, a 19-year-old human living on the planet Perseus VII, learns about one of her ancestors who aided the Shoomarans in saving Earth’s inhabitants. Cassiopeia subsequently spearheads the fight for humans to be admitted into the intergalactic Universal Alliance, but some in the Shoomaran Empire have trouble believing in the strange race of Homo sapiens. The final and shortest novel, Mankind 2.0, takes readers back to Allen’s time period. He concocts a drastic plan to safeguard humanity from a Chaos Machine–predicted superstorm as well as other potential doomsday scenarios. Hamilton’s (Goddess of the Gillani, 2018, etc.) three books skillfully complement one another. While each novel is a self-contained narrative, this collection feels like one lengthy story divided into a trio of sections. There’s the occasional recap of preceding events, but it never overwhelms the saga or slows the overall steady pace. In the same vein, both technology and popular sci-fi notions are relatively simple. Portable notepods, for example, are familiar devices, described at one point as “computer tablets on steroids.” Even the more exotic Chaos Machine is comprehensible. Any intercession based on the machine’s predictions calls forth the butterfly effect, a phenomenon the author wisely assumes sci-fi fans already know. The author’s true focus is the story’s emotional core, including the Shoomarans’ ultimate decision to help humans; Cassiopeia’s exploration of her origin; and the very real possibility that a particular cataclysm will be unavoidable. Unfortunately, dialogue among so many characters is sometimes too interchangeable. Though Hamilton clarifies that he’s essentially translating the alien Universal language into English, the aliens and humans mostly sound alike, as one of the Shoomarans even drops a Star Wars–inspired line. But characters are otherwise distinctive. Tireless Cassiopeia is a standout: Securing admission into the alliance requires outsmarting the Shoomaran prime minister, who’s 69,000 years old. The book likewise boasts a bit of mystery, particularly throughout Contact. It entails a few references, like the Final Blackout, that aren’t clear until Mankind hops back in time.
A trilogy of exuberant and lucid tales that exhibits a fear of the future, regardless of the time period.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979168-77-9
Page Count: 646
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
