A small, clever novel obscured rather than enlightened by philosophy, synthesis, analysis and travelogue.
Another textbook disguised as a novel: the first of a projected trilogy from Robinson (Galileo's Dream, 2009, etc.) set in a future similar to that envisioned in his Mars trilogy from the 1990s.
By the 24th century, humanity has established settlements throughout the solar system on terraformed moons and planets and inside habitats hollowed from conveniently orbiting asteroids. Travel to the most remote destination takes mere weeks; quantum computers, qubes, are ubiquitous but have not yet reached true sentience. Former habitat designer Swan Er Hong makes her home on Mercury, where the city of Terminator crawls around the planet on rails, perpetually keeping just ahead of the rising sun. Her beloved grandmother, Alex, has just died. Two individuals, diminutive investigator Jean Genette and Wahram, a huge, froglike negotiator, wonder whether Swan's recently deceased, beloved grandmother Alex left any information about her work—Alex studied Earth which, despite mass emigration, remains a basket case of environmental degradation, climate change and vampire capitalism. Then Swan, who has a qube named Pauline inside her head and once swallowed a cocktail of alien bacteria from Enceladus, and Wahram narrowly escape when Terminator is destroyed by an undetectable shower of meteorites directed from somewhere in space. Seems Alex, who distrusted qubes and all forms of electronic communication, had good reason for her paranoia: apart from the mysterious group who destroyed Terminator, somebody is building humanoid bodies operated by qubes, for purposes none of the three can guess. Other than Robinson's usual novelistic virtues, the narrative offers a grand tour of the inhabited worlds, often to excess, plus padding with 18 future-factual "extracts" to fill in the background, 15 rather bizarre "lists" (e.g. space accidents, propulsion systems) and three passages representing the mental processes of the humanoid qubes.
A small, clever novel obscured rather than enlightened by philosophy, synthesis, analysis and travelogue.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-09812-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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