A space opera that asks compelling questions about technology dependence but whose answers lack nuance.
In Curtis’ SF sequel, a technophobic future humanity reckons with its choices on a mission to form an alliance with one of the galaxy’s most powerful species.
The humans of Earth—as well as those on Mars and other colonies—are unified under the democratic Joint Confederacy. They’ve made a collective decision to shirk most technology, including social media. As a result, the military is the primary user of cutting-edge tech, with most other people using only devices from the 20th century and earlier. In the first book of the Great Leap Backward series, The Mars One Incident(2019), Capt. Alma Johnson of the starship Indy became a hero for saving the JC during a dangerous mission to Mars. As a result, she and her crew are sent on another mission to the neighboring human civilization Shimbahn Unification of 5 to ask for advanced weaponry to face the growing threat from Terra Nova, a political group that wants to return technology to the rest of humanity. After a three-year journey in stasis, Alma and her crew awaken on the Unification planet, where the people look strangely similar to themselves. Soon, the crew of the Indy learns about the Unification’s odd customs, including acceptance of technology and religion not shared by those in the JC. Despite her apprehension regarding the Unification’s integration of technology into all citizens’ lives, Alma becomes close to the heir to the empire’s throne, which injects some contemporary romance into the space opera, complete with a fake-relationship trope that fans of the romance genre may enjoy. Over the course of the novel, Curtis plots the story well, and the graceful prose and character development successfully make the book seem less didactic than it is. Still, the moral superiority with which JC characters talk about tech may strike some readers as somewhat jarring, especially when the ostensible utopia they’re all trying to protect feels more like tyranny than the story seems to intend.
A space opera that asks compelling questions about technology dependence but whose answers lack nuance.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2022
ISBN: 9798849101408
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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