An ambitious interplanetary tale that’s hampered by haphazard execution.
Aliens, mercenaries, and hyperevolved house cats collide in a drug-fueled, blood-soaked road quest to save the world in Hammond’s SF novel.
Away in the far reaches of space, the planet Halteres is home to the Arca Trochia, an omniscient fungus with the power to transport the world’s violent alien factions to their new chosen dominion: Earth. But there, the hapless and depressive human author Dr. Stanley Ivan Vanderbilt believes that Halteres is just the product of his imagination. Ten years ago, he was unknowingly seeded by the Arca Trochia’s spores, and he wrote about Halteres’ inhabitants as a means to escape from his unfulfilling life. Now, he’s fallen under their influence again, and this time, they’ve compelled him to attach bionic opposable thumbs to his pet cats. Things spiral further out of control when the thumbs trigger an evolutionary leap, granting the cats sentience, psychic abilities, and miraculous biological advancements—but a tenuous grasp of morality, at best. Before long, Vanderbilt is at the mercy of his superpowered predator pets, and he’s also become a target for intergalactic assassins who can hijack human corpses. Injured, out of options, and desperate for a greater purpose, Vanderbilt flees blindly into the heart of the American Southwest. Along for the ride are Ashleigh,a mysterious and deadly vigilante with a souped-up car and a destination that she’s not planning to reveal anytime soon; Vanderbilt’s drug-addled best friend, Xeno; and his capricious feline companion, Patton. Along the way, the humans consume huge amounts of booze and drugs, visit the seedy underbellies of multiple places, find unlikely allies, and leave a gory path of destruction involving earthlings and aliens alike.
The novel employs an odd mix of campy grotesquerie, self-referential gag humor, and convoluted SF concepts, which makes it alternately intriguing and incoherent. Some readers may enjoy its irreverent, absurdist embrace of ultraviolent power fantasies, its hypersexual women who glory in their own objectification, and its grungy, sprawling fictional world, splattered with bodily fluids. Others, however, will find these same aspects rather off-putting, and they’ll feel that certain characters come off as offensive stereotypes. For the most part, Hammond is at his best in moments of stillness, when he allows his players to stop all the quipping and actually explore their connections to the world and one another. The author’s descriptions can be genuinely lovely, as when they address the American landscape, the feeling of being in a car headed nowhere, and the unbearable hugeness of the world in general. However, the novel feels torn between so many premises that none of them feel adequately explained. Several references are made to past events that aren’t elaborated upon, and the author introduces and discards a large number of secondary characters without ever fully fleshing them out. It’s not the most cohesive piece of science fiction, overall, but it is certainly never boring, and fans of its particular style will likely find themselves entertained by its hedonism and gruesome revelry.
An ambitious interplanetary tale that’s hampered by haphazard execution.Pub Date: May 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73398-717-2
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.
An intricate plot for revenge drives this far-future SF political thriller, a debut novel that is also the first of a trilogy.
The planets of the Treble are ruled by the Kindom, a religious order, and the wealthy First Families. Esek Nightfoot, a cruel, vicious, and sociopathically self-interested Cleric and First Family scion, cut off all career opportunities for a brilliant student called Six, challenging them to do something “extraordinary” to impress her into taking them as a novitiate. Six’s “extraordinary” act was to leave school before graduation and begin collecting evidence that exposes the Nightfoots’ complicity in a genocide. Esek has pursued Six for years, often with the uneasy assistance of Cleric Chono, a far more pious person who feels loyalty both to Six, a former schoolmate, and to Esek, who once pulled Chono out of a sexually abusive situation. Their quest eventually leads to Jun Ironway, a gifted hacker who holds a piece of the data implicating the Nightfoots and also has her own dark history with both Esek and Six. Does Esek want to kill Six, as her family’s matriarch demands, or make good on her promise to make them one of her novitiates? Or does she have something else entirely in mind? As the political situation of the Treble becomes more unstable, the chase careens toward a violent and shocking endgame. The narrative jumps around in time, fully filling in past events that are initially referenced in the present-day story. At first this seems unnecessary and confusing, but as several staggering twists emerge, it becomes clear that the choice is utterly necessary and the confusion might actually be the author’s method of obscuring a key revelation. The reader may figure out that revelation before it explodes in the text but will likely be surprised by a good part of what follows. The author also does an excellent job of applying what are typically high fantasy or historical fiction tropes (the tension between religious and secular entities, the unrest over the hereditary passage of power, and the fraught relationship between mentor and student) to high-tech science fiction (perhaps Dune was an influence?).
An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-316-46332-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed but satisfying SF adventure that is, at times, mind-blowing.
Jordan’s ambitious debut novel is an epic science-fiction adventure that chronicles the journey of an orphaned Human girl—believed to be the last member of an extinct species—from interstellar pariah to potential savior of her infamous race.
Sarya the Daughter lives with her adopted mother, Shenya the Widow—a giant, spiderlike “apex predator…wrapped in lightning and darkness”—on an orbital water-mining station in the rings of a giant gaseous planet. As a citizen of the Network, a vast accumulation of intelligence consisting of millions of species that has enabled faster-than-light travel and prevented conflict for a half-billion years, Shenya has protected Sarya and lied about her true identity: She is a Human, the one race destroyed by the Network because of its destructive tendencies. But when a bounty hunter attempts to abduct Sarya and her home is destroyed, the little Human finds herself on the run and all alone in a universe inhabited by godlike intelligences who may be using her as a pawn in a much deeper game. As she learns more about her race’s tumultuous relationship with the Network, she begins to realize that even one small, moderately intelligent bipedal being can make a difference, even when it involves conflicts with godlike entities. The sheer scope of the story is noteworthy, from the various intelligence tiers, which include groupminds and sentient planets, to the colossal settings (orbital stations, spaceships, the end of the universe, etc.). The theme of free will also packs a powerful punch. But while the grand-scale premise of the narrative is laudable, the story gets unwieldy in places, and the momentum suffers. Additionally, Sarya—while an intriguing character—never becomes fully three-dimensional, and the emotional impact of her journey feels muted and detached, overshadowed by the massiveness of the story unfolding around her.
A flawed but satisfying SF adventure that is, at times, mind-blowing.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49981-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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