A frisky, if somewhat convoluted, SF satire with some Shakespearean knavery.
In Smith’s SF series installment, an interplanetary actor/singer/rogue faces warlike cephalopod aliens using faster-than-light technology.
This series relates the zesty, comedic, and rather torturously plotted capers of Jack Jones, a crewman aboard the starship Shakespeare. The crew poses as Earth’s cultural ambassadors, performing human music and classic plays for various alien species, but in reality, they’re spies/troubleshooters looking out for humankind’s interests. Jack and the Shakespeare team were slow to realize that their faster-than-light drives are part of a fiendish plot by their inventors, the octopuslike Quihiri. After an “upgrade” issued from the Quihiri homeworld, the drives begin to fail, leaving many alien civilizations suddenly helpless before xenophobic Quihiri armies. The opening plunks the reader right down in the middle of all this, and over the course of the book, Jack tries to unite with Earth’s forces and share intel to thwart the villains without being separated from his Shakespeare friends in the fog of combat. His new compatriots—including Max, a superintelligent talking dog—are less than open-minded about Jack’s occasional Quihiri allies and unconventional methods. Readers unfamiliar with this complicated series should know that Jack is a young clone of the lawless original Jack (“Old-Jack”), who languishes in jail; the clone inherited Old-Jack’s cover job and his ship-captain romantic partner, Gina. A semi-endearing facet of the material is that the new Jack is truly a lover, not a fighter, who tries to solve things with kisses rather than gunfire. Early on, Jack meets Jax Jones, who looks and acts exactly like him—which oddly isn’t fully addressed until the closing pages. There are numerous quotes from Shakespeare as well as a famous Star Wars line and Cats lyrics. The author is a physicist at the University of Colorado, and she ably uses her expertise to spike her fiction with quantum theory. In a brief afterword, she also acknowledges her debt to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cycle, which readers will notice—especially in the detail of improbability-powered star travel. Jack’s larkish antics may also captivate fans of Harry Harrison’s classic Bill the Galactic Hero series.
A frisky, if somewhat convoluted, SF satire with some Shakespearean knavery.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950198-25-2
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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