A tight, engaging sci-fi tale.
A researcher attempts to save the International Space Station from a terrorist plot in Lanning’s debut novel.
In the not-too-distant future, the ice caps are melting, submerging the world’s coasts but leaving Antarctica open for habitation. Lowry Walker, a resident of the polar continent, has been invited to spend two years as a research assistant aboard the new, enormous International Space Station, helping to survey Antarctica from above. At first, Lowry is in awe of the technology that surrounds her, but soon the artificial environment begins to disturb her. Later, she asks a co-worker, “Do you ever stop to think about the human beast, Sevy? Outside of war, disease, and hunger, there’s just no fun anymore.” When a computer virus temporarily shuts down power on the station, Lowry and her colleagues are reminded just how close they are to death. More alarmingly, it’s revealed that the virus entered the station’s computers via one of Lowry’s surveying files. The Earth’s precarious geopolitical situation—millions of refugees and limited land—means that there’s no shortage of reasons that someone might want to attack the station. As political powers rush to use the attack to further their own aims, Lowry must work with her uncle, Nick Walker, a volunteer police officer in Antarctica, to discover the saboteur before he or she destroys the station and all the souls on board. Lanning writes in a chatty, accessible prose that mimics Lowry’s caustic, semi-jaded worldview. For a space-based thriller, the author pays an admirable amount of attention to her characters’ emotions, even if the execution is occasionally unsubtle: “Her head fell into her hands, and her shoulders jerked as her tears flowed. She had given herself permission to grieve—not so much for her failed marriage as for the loss of her innocence.” The troubled world of the novel, however, feels disturbingly believable, and the central mystery is compelling without ever feeling over the top. The novel’s well-drawn characters, nicely paced plot, and satisfying conclusion will please sci-fi fans of every stripe.
A tight, engaging sci-fi tale.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9991210-1-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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