Sometimes amusing and informative but more often barely tepid, with stock characters, a contrived mess of a plot and ideas...
From the author of Steel Beach (1992), etc., a yarn about time travel and—well, you guessed it.
Mammoth-obsessed industrialist moneybags Howard Christian’s team scours the Canadian permafrost for a mammoth carcass from which Howard hopes to clone a living example. They find a perfectly preserved specimen. Huddled against it is a frozen human, 12,000 years old. He’s wearing a wrist watch. Nearby lies a briefcase. Howard summons super-geek physicist Matt Wright to his warehouse in California to examine the briefcase. Along with some bits of circuitry, it contains an array of spheres set in a sort of movable Rubik’s Cube matrix. Howard proceeds with the mammoth-cloning program, hiring elephant expert Susan Morgan to oversee the pregnancy. Matt replicates the briefcase device but can’t get anything to work. Some nutty animal-rights fanatics break into the warehouse. One takes a whack at a time machine—and Matt, Susan, the warehouse and the elephants arrive 12,000 years in the past! Though the elephants head off for pastures new, there are plenty of real mammoths around. In an inspired moment, Matt manipulates the spheres and brings himself, Susan and several mammoths back to the present. Varley tells us a children’s story about one of the survivors, Little Fuzzy, in alternate chapters. Soon, mysterious agents kidnap Matt and relentlessly interrogate him about the time machine, but even he can’t figure it out. Can the past or the present be changed? Who invented the time machine? And who is fated to die 12,000 years in the past?
Sometimes amusing and informative but more often barely tepid, with stock characters, a contrived mess of a plot and ideas that refuse to delve beneath the superficial.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-441-01281-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Shannon’s prose style is serviceable, but her legion of fans will once again be here for the propulsive plot rather than...
Paige Mahoney, the Pale Dreamer of The Bone Season (2013), returns in this second volume of a projected seven-volume fantasy/science-fiction epic.
The novel begins with Paige’s escape to London as she eludes pursuers of all stripes and becomes public enemy No. 1. On the plus side, she’s with a gang of clairvoyants, and her cohort is headed by Jaxon Hall, one of the mime-lords of the title. (Mime-lords and mime-queens are leaders of clairvoyant gangs who form a subgroup within the various cohorts.) London becomes the main setting of the novel, and it assumes various guises, some comforting but most harrowing. Cohorts inhabit spaces that seem vaguely familiar (Covent Garden, Camden Town, Soho) yet remain mysterious and sinister. Readers of the first volume might also remember the emphasis on a specialized and arcane vocabulary applicable to the alternative universe the author creates. The glossary is again a welcome necessity. The prime mover of action here is Paige’s relentless pursuit by Scion, a governmental organization that sees her as a threat to its status and power. Eventually Paige meets up again with Arcturus Mesarthim, her Warden and a Rephaite—a physically immortal being. He has some advice for her—to be wary and to “manipulate [her] mime-lord…as he has spent his life manipulating others”—good advice for a world that is arcane, complex, multilayered and at times almost incomprehensible.
Shannon’s prose style is serviceable, but her legion of fans will once again be here for the propulsive plot rather than lyricism.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-893-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.
A post-apocalyptic—and pre-apocalyptic—debut.
It’s 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. She doesn’t love her job as a production assistant—she helps publishers make specialty Bibles—but it’s a steady paycheck. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn’t go with him, so she’s in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Victims don’t die immediately. Instead, they slide into a mechanical existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. These zombies aren’t out hunting humans; instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart. Retail workers fold and refold T-shirts. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. A handful of people seem to be immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. The connection between existence before the End and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. The fevered aren’t all that different from the factory workers who produce Bibles for Candace’s company. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones; Candace is only able to complete the contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn’t mind too much if its workers die from lung disease. This is a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. This is Ma’s first novel, but her fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. She knows her craft, and it shows. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. She’s sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever. Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience.
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26159-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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