A dark, forceful opening yields to a lighter, fun-filled SF escapade.
In this SF novel, a mistaken order sends a starship to attack an innocent planet—leading to a massive retaliation—and a lone human survivor must grapple with the hostile alien world.
Stith concocts a future “Web of Worlds” affiliation of space-traveling civilizations, superficially resembling Star Trek’s Federation, but lacking Gene Roddenberry-style ethics and responsibility. The vessel Star Storm, manned by humans and aliens alike, is sent to lightly strafe a distant, rogue planet to make its bellicose denizens behave. By mistake, the order sends the Star Storm to the wrong place, a planet called Aretta, outside the Web of Worlds. There, the unexpected bombardment causes casualties among the advanced, insular natives—a four-footed race called the Reffen, who resemble canines. The enraged Reffen respond with weapons deadlier than anticipated, destroying the Star Storm. A human survivor is a medic, Lt. Nick Sparrow, a nice guy running from his past. Nick’s evacuation pod lands on the Earthlike Aretta, where he strives to evade capture by Reffen patrols, in what he assumes will be only a few days before a rescue ship arrives. But there is no rescue ship; the elites who sent the attack order are covering up the affair. Meanwhile, first-person narrator Nick manages to earn the trust of two young Reffen, Pemmy and Glot, who are in, er, puppy love. What starts out as a harrowing SF Robinson Crusoe survival tale, of which Andy Weir’s The Martian(2014) is preeminent, turns into a, well, shaggy-dog yarn of problem-solving capers, the weight of which falls surprisingly on the lighthearted side. Plot twists end up being dictated by not one, but two deus ex machina devices. First, Nick has an implanted artificial intelligence in his head called Natalie, a wisecracking (“Pretty clever for a human”) entity who acts as universal translator, troubleshooter, and sidekick. Second, Aretta holds a fantastic ancient infrastructure from a long-gone, amphibious alien race that the water-averse Reffen have largely left alone. This still-functioning technology is just waiting around to furnish the protagonists with most of the solutions they need in their travails. The result is a lively, engaging space jaunt with elements of justice and payback in the end. But the story is a little too reliant on contrivances in getting there.
A dark, forceful opening yields to a lighter, fun-filled SF escapade.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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