A sci-fi romp that’s vast in scale yet thoroughly playful.
A novel sees a woman shunted through time and space as two universes go to war.
Virginia Sun-Jones, a Korean American who goes by Gin, is enjoying Christmas with her family in Nags Head, North Carolina. Unseasonable warmth has allowed Gin; her husband, Alan; their daughter, Grace; and her son-in-law, Eric, to visit the beach for a picnic. When Gin catches an antique newspaper blowing in the wind, she notes the publication date of March 28, 1827. She then proposes a toast, but it’s interrupted by a thunderstorm, during which she finds herself mysteriously alone. She eventually meets a woman named Hope and learns that she’s been transported to 1827. Strangely, Gin still possesses a pearl that she found on the beach before the picnic. This legendary Cintamani pearl grants her desires for dry, clean clothes and much more when she asks to leave 1827 in search of her family. A sentience known as the Quantum Opposable Singularity provides Gin with a dragon called Hangul to travel further in time. Gin, despite a limited understanding of the cosmos, has been chosen to combat a disastrous Unwinding of the universe. Entities like Golaeth, who oversees the cosmic nursery, and Emperor Calaneris XXIII, who believes the cosmos is a labyrinth to be pruned, strive to control the chaos as two universes clash. In this sci-fi series opener, Rew (Erenarch Academy, 2018, etc.) fans her fiery imagination consistently throughout this time- and dimension-hopping adventure. Lines like “I have no eyes, but I can see wavelengths pulsing as if I still had an optic nerve they could travel” challenge readers to keep pace with genuinely alien tableaux. Strange characters, such as alien physicists Benrus and Ralff, have brightly sketched backstories that could carry their own novels, contributing to the tale’s episodic feel. And while “whole areas of space-time are being deleted,” Gin’s pearl and other MacGuffins that can do virtually anything lessen the plot’s overall tension. Grounded revelations regarding Alan, Grace, and Eric provide the emotional signal that cuts through lots of Doctor Who–style noise.
A sci-fi romp that’s vast in scale yet thoroughly playful.Pub Date: July 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73221-899-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sophont Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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