A Heinlein-like adventure for a serious sci-fi fan.
Scalzi (Redshirts, 2012, etc.) offers his fifth in the Old Man’s War series.
The Colonial Union keeps peace among the universe’s humans, albeit one fractured after Earth’s withdrawal. Blame John Perry and Jane Sagan, Roanoke Colony leaders. Earth’s billions had provided Colonial Defense Forces troopers and outpost settlers, which allowed the Colonial Union to cope with the machinations of the Conclave, an alliance of alien (nonhuman) species. Scalzi rockets characters through assorted space adventures, with repeated appearances by Lt. Harry Wilson, CDF technician and Earth native, who finds himself wherever the action is, whether that’s in space disarming a missile trap set for the Utche, an alien species with whom the Colonial Union is negotiating, or caring for an ambassador’s dog whose survival figures into an alien civil war. Other players pop up repeatedly, including two CDF colonels, a hard-line ambassador and a female starship captain. Starships use "skip drive" to outwit Einsteinian physics and "skip drones" to communicate across light years. Human characters communicate in dialogue laced with 21st-century humor and irony, even among the CDF troopers (repurposed 75-year-old earthlings) equipped with "BrainPals," neural-computer implants. The aliens too function with socioethical and political mores replicating Machiavelli, authoritarians or third-rate dictators. Laced with oddball humor, the plot is not so esoteric that a newbie to sci-fi’s outlier world cannot follow, and the science buy in isn’t so great as to cause those who mastered introductory physics to stumble. The story simply launches human quandaries and foibles into the universe—greed, aggression, duplicity, arrogance, chauvinism and other distinctly human negatives—where they are imposed on alien circumstances, creatures and environments. Females share power and failure equally, but sex and romance take a back seat to wildcat settlements, derring-do heroes, missiles fired and messages misunderstood, all of which are offset by stunning technology, imagined landscapes and the covert destruction of Earth Station by spaceships piloted by brains-in-boxes. That makes for a gateway to the next episode.
A Heinlein-like adventure for a serious sci-fi fan.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3351-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.
Brown is back with Book 4 of his Red Rising series (Morning Star, 2016, etc.) and explores familiar themes of rebellion, revenge, and political instability.
This novel examines the ramifications and pitfalls of trying to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. The events here take place 10 years after the conclusion of Morning Star, which ended on a seemingly positive note. Darrow, aka Reaper, and his lover, Virginia au Augustus, aka Mustang, had vanquished the Golds, the elite ruling class, so hope was held out that a new order would arise. But in the new book it becomes clear that the concept of political order is tenuous at best, for Darrow’s first thoughts are on the forces of violence and chaos he has unleashed: “famines and genocide...piracy...terrorism, radiation sickness and disease...and the one hundred million lives lost in my [nuclear] war.” Readers familiar with the previous trilogy—and you'll have to be if you want to understand the current novel—will welcome a familiar cast of characters, including Mustang, Sevro (Darrow’s friend and fellow warrior), and Lysander (grandson of the Sovereign). Readers will also find familiarity in Brown’s idiosyncratic naming system (Cassius au Bellona, Octavia au Lune) and even in his vocabulary for cursing (“Goryhell,” “Bloodydamn,” “Slag that”). Brown introduces a number of new characters, including 18-year-old Lyria, a survivor of the initial Rising who gives a fresh perspective on the violence of the new war—and violence is indeed never far away from the world Brown creates. (He includes one particularly gruesome gladiatorial combat between Cassius and a host of enemies.) Brown imparts an epic quality to the events in part by his use of names. It’s impossible to ignore the weighty connotations of characters when they sport names like Bellerephon, Diomedes, Dido, and Apollonius.
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28591-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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