A smart, if dizzying, SF sequel that never slows down.
This second installment of a series finds a human Watchman attempting to keep the peace between two combative universes while a third force interferes.
Violet Rain is a virtual reality engineer from the 25th century. She’s also a Watchman, a select being for whom the boundaries of time and space mean little. From the space station STS-99, she conducts “multiverse surveillance” alongside fellow Watchmen Ben, Ralff, and Yverra. As Violet explores the Yin-Yang Boundary between two clashing universes—using the body of a microscopic tardigrade—something attacks the station. A “timeslip” to an adjacent dimension saves the Watchmen. Golaeth, the “baby-sitter entity” that tracks new universes, confirms that a rogue cosmos is on the loose. In the midst of the Watchmen’s search, Violet visits her human ancestors, Virginia and Alan, in 21st-century North Carolina. They introduce her to Janus Parker, a VR “whiz kid” and co-founder of the pivotal tech company Canny Divide. Meanwhile, Emperor Calaneris, hell-bent on destroying the Yin Universe, plucks Xoan-Paulo Hilario, Violet’s former fling, from the doomed Mars Colony. Calaneris turns Xoan-Paulo into the Enforcer, a deadly cyborg loyal to nobody but the emperor. While Janus shows Violet around California and Las Vegas, the Enforcer begins hunting these two instrumental figures protecting the Yin Universe. Rew’s latest adventure doesn’t overplay its cosmic motifs, keeping plenty of action Earth-bound after the setup. There’s a lively weight to the Enforcer’s chase and a self-aware reference from the film Terminator (“Come with me if you want to live”) that will make SF fans chuckle. Violet is a protagonist readers may be divided on; she’s spunky but says glib things like “I never thought about the 21st century much. Everybody mostly remembers it as the century where the world ignored climate change.” Readers meet the story’s titular hero, the tardigrade, which can survive extremes of temperature and pressure and even “go into hibernation and reawaken years later when conditions improved.” The author’s joy in combining hard science with high-concept space opera is evident on every page, though the grandeur of universes in motion sometimes threatens to diminish her characters.
A smart, if dizzying, SF sequel that never slows down.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Sophont Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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