An often thrilling tale of an unpredictable future.
In Harris’ SF novel, a doctor’s psychological evaluation of an unusual patient could doom the planet.
Ernest Kairos is asked by one of his hospital’s emergency-room physicians to engage with a newer patient to see if they warrant continuing an involuntary psych hold. Irisa Solovyov, who prefers to be called “Iris,” is a 20-year-old college student studying computational neuroscience; she came in recovering from a drug-induced hallucination that appears to involve delusional thinking, which is Kairos’ field of expertise. Kairos promises to call off the hold if she tells him the full story of her vision—and it’s unlike anything he’d ever heard from other patients. He listens to Iris’ tales and secretly records them; first, he hears about her apparent visions of past lives, in which she was a young Italian woman in the 1960s or an Egyptian boy playing an ancient board game, among others. She found a shaman to help her guide her mental travels, but after drinking a hallucinogenic drink, she found herself inhabiting in the body of a strange, “human-esque” but clearly inhuman creature in the future; unlike her previous visions, this time she was stuck, and couldn’t return to her own time or body. After a few days as a weird, gray worker among many others, the creature Iris inhabits was taken by its gods to another place she could never have predicted—and where she encounters a very strange companion, indeed. Harris’ offbeat work of speculative fiction is told mainly through transcripts of Kairos’ audio files. Its vision of the future is an unusual one that’s both plausible and horrifying, and readers will certainly find it unforgettable. The work features some stunning worldbuilding along the way, and readers will feel as misplaced, and as entranced, as Iris does in her vision. None of the major players in the narrative are particularly likable, as their flaws are always on clear display; however, this has the effect of making them feel all the more genuine—and, ultimately, all the more human.
An often thrilling tale of an unpredictable future.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326217
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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