A serviceable SF/fantasy tale that touches on the pitfalls of violence and revenge.
On a besieged planet, a warrior battles to save his adopted colony from an alien conqueror in Springs’ military-SF series starter.
In the far future, the human-colonized planet Etrusci has been hit hard by marauding chitins—giant beetle creatures that are reminiscent of those in the film Starship Troopers (1997). A mysterious force field has hindered air travel for 40 years, so the entire human population has withdrawn to the heavily fortified city of New Olympia. One of its defenders is young Liam, a genetically modified Finnian warrior (part of a “subspecies of humans”) who, as a war orphan, was adopted into one of New Olympia’s ruling families, despite opposition from Councilor Licinious, a ruling council member. Licinious and other traitors sabotage New Olympia’s defenses, leaving the city vulnerable to invasion by alien Gothowan warlord Azurius, an aspiring galactic emperor who breeds and controls the chitin as mindless soldiers. Most of New Olympia’s hierarchy are slain in the onslaught, but Liam survives, though he’s presumed dead. Liam, mentored in martial-mystic techniques by a more benign Gothowan, does one-man counterstrikes. Azurius, impressed, invites Liam to join his villainous crew, noting that Liam’s ferocity and his thirst for retribution are key to bringing the lad to the dark side. Only belatedly does Spring provide backstory that all this takes place somewhere in the 30th century or later, and that Finnians were bred for belligerence, but took their destiny into their own hands to be a force for good; a strongly ethical, matriarchal religion seems to be integral. The plot also trades in espionage/combat via out-of-body travel, and even manipulations of time. Much of the tale, however, boils down to somewhat repetitious fight scenes with occasional timeouts for exposition and cackling by the flamboyantly wicked antagonist, who enjoys quoting Shakespeare. That said, Liam’s chronic guilt over committing acts of violence, even in wartime, is a bit atypical for the genre. Action-minded readers will find nothing taxing about the science-related material, nor will they mind the mysticism on the side. Sequels have already been announced.
A serviceable SF/fantasy tale that touches on the pitfalls of violence and revenge.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133627
Page Count: 305
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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