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APOSTROPHES AND APOCALYPSES

Barnes’s first collection, comprising 13 stories, including four previously unpublished, and eight essays, is divided, obscurely, into sections headed “While you Wait,” “For the End,” “Let Us Spend some Time,” and “Talking to People Who Aren’t There.” The essays form two groups: one, for and about teenagers and what it means to be one today, holds little interest for anyone else; the second concerns science fiction and writing: building a convincing new world or future (Barnes, in meticulous and tedious detail, shows how he modeled his novels A Million Open Doors, 1992, and Earth Made of Glass, p.450); the craft of SF; SF and unreasonable hopes; SF and the future; and creative writing and “that style thingie.” In the fiction, two stories are set in worlds created in novels (Mother of Storms, 1994, and Kaleidoscope Century, 1995). There are three rather tiresome stories about writing stories. In the humor department, we meet Christopher Columbus as he certainly wasn’t, and ponder thoughts considered as particles, or “thinkons.” In a flawed but fascinating fantasy—it reads like a poorly condensed novel—Creators are malicious gods; we killed ours, but in Faerie theirs is still alive, so elves are evil oppressors. Another yarn features intelligent animals and interspecies sex that, it seems, humans have a hard time accepting. And Barnes offers a banal explanation for why we’ve had no alien visitors. The remainder are rather heavily political consciousness-raisers: a world where the communists won the Cold War; America under a religious dictatorship; and, somehow not so different, America under a moral dictatorship. Concerns that in Barnes’s fine novels may be assets, or minor flaws—density; limited originality; pedestrian writing—become problems in the shorter format; annoying, too, is the presumption of a largely teenaged audience.

Pub Date: Dec. 20, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-86147-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

From the Remembrance of Earth's Past series , Vol. 1

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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