A boldly imaginative SF epic that mixes rousing action with plangent psychological depth.
An android battles a robot cult that wants to wipe out humankind in Griffin’s SF adventure.
The narrative unfolds in a future where space-mining companies have accidentally destroyed Earth, forcing humans, robots, and artificial intelligences to disperse to other planets. Piloting his space freighter, the Red Dwarf, Cpt. Sam Stonewell travels to the planet Oregon 4 to pick up a passenger called Kingsley, a slight, boyish android with blond hair, a royal blue coat, and loads of good-hearted charm who’s trying to find his missing castle. The search takes the Red Dwarf to offbeat locales, including a hippie planet whose atmosphere contains high percentages of pot smoke and hallucinogenic mushroom spores, and New Descartes, headquarters of the Church of the Holy Androids Order of the Singularity, which believes that the universe will disintegrate if there are no humans alive to observe it. Kingsley is significant to the Church, which regards him as the one nonhuman who qualifies as a conscious Observer of the universe. Kingsley gets wind of a plot by CHAOS, a sinister offshoot of the Church that’s planning to create the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence that will impose perfect order on the universe after spreading a virus that will sterilize humankind so as to eliminate messy human free will. Kingsley and the Red Dwarf crew set out to thwart CHAOS with the help of a Catholic nun who doubles as a hit woman, a hotshot fighter pilot, and a mysterious old woman who sits in her wheelchair and knits.
Griffin’s yarn creates a richly detailed fictive future world that has a familiar, lived-in feel as it satirizes present-day discontents: Earth-vintage cigarettes are collectors’ items worth their weight in gold, people struggle to pay off 250-year mortgages, bureaucracy is still maddening, and ambient holo-ads are annoying (“SmileBoost! Now in mango! Side effects may include the sudden return of childhood dread and teeth that glow in the dark!”). The technology is inventive and aesthetic, like the electric guitars that spaceship pilots use as instrument panels. The book is in part a crackerjack space opera that features engrossing action scenes in which intricate tech deals out vigorous mayhem: “Twin streams of superheated tungsten lanced across the chamber, striking the wall-mounted weapons with surgical precision. The first emplacement simply vaporized…The second managed to return fire for exactly 1.3 seconds before Boombot’s superior targeting algorithms reduced it to molten slag.” But the story also has philosophical and emotional substance, especially regarding Kingsley’s predicament; he’s doomed to suffer agonizing foreknowledge of loss and defeat (“Imagine knowing exactly how you’ll die, when everyone you care about will leave, how every good thing ends”) and freighted with a burden of memory that Griffin renders in darkly lyrical prose: “Watched the moon crack from a rooftop in Manhattan. Beautiful and terrible, like a sunset made of apocalypse. The sky rained debris for weeks afterward. Killed millions, of course, but very prettily. Humans always did have a talent for aesthetic destruction.” The result is a tech-drenched fantasy that still has plenty of heart.
A boldly imaginative SF epic that mixes rousing action with plangent psychological depth.Pub Date: May 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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