Solid, old-school space adventure and intrigue.
Humankind’s mission to colonize a distant planet suffers a disaster in orbit, leaving a handful of survivors marooned.
DuBoff launches an SF series set in humanity’s spacegoing “Commonwealth” far future by raising the curtain on a fraught crash landing on the Earthlike-planet Aethos by escape pods from a doomed colony ship that barely managed to give the evacuation order. Only a few dozen of the thousands of would-be settlers reach the surface alive, falling short of the plateau meant to be their new homestead site on the otherwise uninhabited (well…supposedly uninhabited) planet. The first to meet and team up among the survivors are attractive “xenobiologist” Anya Rojas and a resourceful, mysterious passenger calling himself Evan who intended to start a new life on the stellar frontier. Gradually negotiating a path through predatory animals and poisonous plants, the pair head for the smoldering remains of the military escort ship accompanying their vessel, which also catastrophically crashed. Evidence proves both craft were brought down deliberately. But why? Are the murderous perpetrators on Aethos with them? Anya even begins to suspect Evan, who hints at a former career in the military and security forces but is obviously hiding much. The first half of the narrative is an efficient SF robinsonade with a Golden Age vibe. At about the midpoint, when separate masses of supporting antagonists materialize out of the astro-foliage, the story leans into treasure-hunt skullduggery with some fine ambiguity about who are the good guys and the bad guys (if anyone is a good guy). “Don’t trust anyone you may meet, regardless of who they say they are,” reads a typical piece of cosmic-commando advice before the heroes are thrown into the fray, which includes space pirates, space organized crime, space corrupt politicians, and the possibility of first contact with an alien. Even with dialogue referencing strange “energy readings” and altered gravity, the jungles, forests, and escarpments of Aethos will strike most adventure-seeking readers as territory not all that far removed from old favorites such as Tarzan’s Opar or B. Traven’s Sierra Madre.
Solid, old-school space adventure and intrigue.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781965614013
Page Count: 374
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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