This YA sci-fi novel explores a future in which authorities test psionically gifted teens for inclusion in a cutthroat, corporate-run society.
In 2172, meteors comprised of the parasitic metal adrium leveled the world and also “caused the psionic gene to emerge” within the remnants of humanity, which allowed for telepathy, telekinesis, and even more potent abilities. When 12-year-old Sai’s psionic powers awaken, she destroys residential Block 63, killing and maiming thousands. The people who rebuilt the world after the Disaster Era—the Gerts, Newton & William United Conglomerate—send a man named Bastion to retrieve the person responsible for the chaos. Four years later, Sai is living at a training facility where she’s tested physically and mentally against other psionics her age as well as against humanoid psionic-adrium hybrids called “dominos.” After surviving Sai’s initial training, Bastian becomes her mentor in darker psionic arts, such as stopping a heart. Throughout, Sai acknowledges that the smoothly running capital, UC Central, has problems. Her own parents, living on the outskirts of GNW’s settlement, were addicted to the drug Shine and committed heinous acts to remain high. When Sai learns that Bastian also needs Shine to function, it kindles her questioning nature, forcing her to confront the lies at the center of GNW’s society. Debut author Hanna takes familiar sci-fi genre elements, such as an outsider network of rebels and emotionless, superhuman companions, and spins dystopian gold. The concept of the dominos—including the beings’ color-changing talents—is endlessly fascinating, as is Dom, the sly, original hybrid to whom Sai grows closer throughout the narrative. If readers blink, they’ll miss the quick but potent action sequences (“The crossbow bolt is crudely fashioned, and [Sai] can feel rust flakes falling...into her body”). Sai eventually finds herself becoming the unassuming rallying point for the hopes of those around her. Later, she realizes that in a world where authorities microchip citizens and treat them like products, a better option is to fight to “make it somewhere people want to live.” From top to bottom, this is a fabulous series opener.
A bracing debut that might just knock the wind out of readers.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5147-7768-8
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION
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