Some brisk action closes the proceedings, but otherwise, mediocre problems and solutions—our hero has little idea how to...
Far-future Mr. Fix-it gets into hot water—a familiar Modesitt (The Eternity Artifact, 2005, etc.) scenario here given a trudging workout.
By day, ex-military special operative and narrator Blaine Donne solves business problems and earns large fees; by night, he stalks the back streets of Thurene on planet Devanta, righting small wrongs for free. Suddenly, commissions arrive in a bunch. A wealthy widow wants Donne to investigate her granddaughter’s betrothed, a research doctor she suspects of being a closeted gay. A beautiful lady with no apparent identity wants him to uncover connections between creepy entrepreneur Legaar Eloi, obsessive city planner Judeon Maraniss—another, less frequent narrator—and “Elysium,” whatever that may be. Another client wishes to locate an elusive missing heiress. A case of copyright infringement crops up. Seemingly, the cases are unrelated. However, Eloi and Maraniss operate from a country estate that possesses a huge, hidden power source—but to what end? Donne solicits help from his high-powered elder sister Krij, a corporate-compliance expert. Eloi and Maraniss may be conspiring with a foreign power to overthrow Devanta’s benevolent oligarchy, the Civitas Sorores. Donne resolves the wealthy widow case (he isn’t gay, she is; neither cares) but learns nothing of Elysium except to suspect that his mysterious respondent is a Sorores agent. Finally, the Sorores lose patience with Donne and make their requirements explicit: It seems that he must come out of retirement.
Some brisk action closes the proceedings, but otherwise, mediocre problems and solutions—our hero has little idea how to Google for information and spends most of his time asking his friends for gossip.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31720-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
An entertaining, provocative addition to the spate of literary near-future novels that have lately hit the shelves.
Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupéry and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by Czech immigrant writer Kalfar.
Jakub Procházka—his name, he insists, is “common” and “simple”—is a man of numerous fears, including caterpillars and the possibility of an afterlife, “as in the possibility that life could not be escaped.” An astrophysicist with a beautiful if increasingly estranged wife and a father with a fraught past, Jakub is now pushing the moral equivalent of a giant space broom, collecting cosmic dust for analysis up in the skies on a path to Venus, where the first astronaut from the Czech Republic can stake a claim to space for a nation that the world confuses with Chechnya or, in the words of a powerful technocrat, “reduces us to our great affinity for beer and pornography.” The new world in the sky yields many mysteries, among them an arachnoid spider with whom Jakub, whom the creature calls “skinny human,” has extensive conversations about all manner of things even as events on Earth unfold in ever stranger ways; his wife, Lenka, now has a police tail, and Jakub’s wish to reconcile and produce offspring seems increasingly unlikely. And why does he wish to reproduce? So that, he answers when the creature asks, he reduces the odds of being a nobody, one of many nicely Kafkaesque nods in a book built on sly, decidedly contrarian humor. Whether the Nutella-loving creature is really there or some sort of imagined projection (“A hallucination could not be full of thoughts that had never occurred to me, could it?”) remains something of a mystery, but Jakub’s torments and mostly good-natured if baffled responses to them are the real meat of the story. Blending subtle asides on Czech history, the Cold War, and today’s wobbly democracy, Kalfar’s confection is an inventive, well-paced exercise in speculative fiction.
An entertaining, provocative addition to the spate of literary near-future novels that have lately hit the shelves.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-27343-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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A wild riff on interspecies warfare sure to make pet owners think twice the next time their tabby cats dart by.
A war novel/religious allegory about cats, dogs and giant ants driven by a hive mind. Yes, really.
So, let’s imagine W. Bruce Cameron’s silly and maudlin A Dog’s Purpose recast as a violent and frightening post-apocalyptic global battle for the souls of Earth’s survivors, layered with a messiah prophecy that makes The Matrix look simplistic by comparison. If that’s a bit much, maybe just think Animal Farm re-imagined by Orson Scott Card. Either way, you end up with this devilishly entertaining debut about anthropomorphized animals caught in a conflict between an invading army of insects and the planet’s few remaining humans. The novel begins from the point of view of Sebastian, an aloof but observant house cat whose only true companion is a dog named Sheba. Through animal eyes, he describes Earth’s descent into chaos as giant ants—that’s Hymenoptera unus to you—break through the planet’s crust to wreak havoc on human civilization. At the heart of their plan is the decision to release a virus that gives all animals self-awareness, a bipedal structure and better-than-human intelligence. After the change, Sebastian recreates himself as the cat-warrior Mort(e), the hero of a breakaway army called The Red Sphinx. “Don’t you all know who this is?” says his superior to a new crop of recruits. “This is Mort(e). The hero of the Battle of the Alleghenies. The Mastermind of the Chesapeake Bridge Bombing. The crazy bastard who assassinated General Fitzpatrick in broad daylight. This choker was killing humans before some of you were born.” After a while the story gets kind of messy with a memetic virus called “EMSAH,” the aforementioned prophecy and the preordained battle to end all wars, but it’s still awfully good sci-fi that imagines a world where humans are no longer at the top of the food chain.
A wild riff on interspecies warfare sure to make pet owners think twice the next time their tabby cats dart by.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61695-427-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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