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 epic space adventure.
A thief and a teleporter team up to save their former crew in the finale of Mihalik's Starlight's Shadow trilogy.
Lexi Bowen is one of the most accomplished recovery specialists—code for thief—in the galaxy. She's nervous about taking a contract that requires her to return to Valovia, home planet of the ruthless enemies she once fought as a soldier, but the payout is too enticing to decline. Once she arrives on Valovia, she is almost immediately cornered by the Empress Nepru’s private guards. Teleporter Nilo Shoren appears in the middle of the altercation and teleports her to safety. Lexi’s history with Nilo is complicated. They were both crew members on Starlight’s Shadow, but Lexi has never forgiven Nilo for luring her to what she thought was a date only for him to steal a job right out from under her. She can’t understand why Nilo would save her now, and she’s determined to escape Valovia on her own. Nilo convinces her to accept his help escaping the empress, but their plans change when they discover Starlight’s Shadow and its crew are missing. Lexi and Nilo suspect that their friends were heading for the planet Rodeni, trying to capture a fugitive, and they set a course to mount a rescue mission. Lexi is a likable, tough-as-nails character determined to make it on her own. The truth is that she suffers flashbacks and panic attacks from the war, and she is afraid to show her vulnerabilities to Nilo. Although she tries to convince herself that her attraction to Nilo isn’t serious, she finds it impossible to resist him. In order to be together, they must learn to trust and openly communicate with each other, whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom.
An epic space adventure.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780063051102
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Punchy, plausible, and bittersweet; studded with zingers until the very last line.
The desperate logistics of planning for the apocalypse reach their climax in the conclusion to a space opera trilogy that began with The Collapsing Empire (2017) and The Consuming Fire (2018).
Time is running out for Cardenia Wu-Patrick, aka Grayland II, emperox of the planet-spanning Interdependency. As she struggles to come up with a plan to save the billions who will suffer and starve in the wake of the collapse of the Flow, the extradimensional network connecting the planets of her far-flung empire, her nemesis, Lady Nadashe Nohamapetan, continues to scheme against her. With the support of many of the noble houses—who plan to abandon their subjects while preserving themselves and their wealth in a flight to End, the only self-sufficient planet in the Interdependency—Nadashe now seeks the throne for herself. Meanwhile, Cardenia’s lover, the Flow physicist Lord Marce Claremont, attempts to devise a scientific solution to the Flow collapse, unaware that Cardenia is hiding vital data from him. And the clever but hot-tempered Lady Kiva Lagos attempts to spy on Nadashe in hopes of defusing the coup, but she may have gotten herself in too deep this time. Scalzi treads a delicate line here: He set out to chart an apocalypse, and a deus ex machina would be cheating. The book also serves as an acknowledgment that intelligence and good intentions are not an impregnable armor against venality and the pitiless laws of physics. (In addition to slowing down Scalzi's writing—something he acknowledges in an afterword—the current sociopolitical situation in the U.S. has clearly flavored the story.) Given those parameters, Scalzi plays fair while still offering his readers some hope. And even when depicting the direst situations, Scalzi’s work retains its snarky cheer.
Punchy, plausible, and bittersweet; studded with zingers until the very last line.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8916-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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