Aye, Captain, there is intelligent life in this involving SF adventure.
Onetime Mars colonist Michelle Arensen, suddenly lost in deep space, finds herself in the custody of an intimidating alien race.
In humanity’s space-colonizing future, would-be Mars settler Michelle Arensen tries to put the suicide of her father behind her, working with her husband and brother to build a lasting Red Planet base. Suddenly, a bizarre phenomenon engulfs Michelle and other women on the expedition who find themselves held prisoner by faceless, noncommunicative humanoids. After a series of cruel, fatal medical experiments, the prisoners revolt. When Michelle awakens (a mystery narrative gap that author Weber wisely never fills in, letting the reader's imagination do the job), she has been revived after decades of drifting in space by a different extraterrestrial people. Her new hosts—or captors—are the Vinyi, bipeds with six principal limbs and easily twice the size of humans. Despite such a monstrous-by-human-standards physiognomy (“Grey skin. Tentacles. Tusks. Black eyes. Huge”), the Vinyi are not as nasty as the faceless creatures who killed Arensen’s co-workers (demonstrated when a shift in narrative voice takes readers into the minds of the crew of the Vinyi spaceship). Their discovery of Michelle is the first Vinyi contact with any species like Homo sapiens. Providentially, Michelle is a linguist. She adopts the Vinyi tongue and communicates her dilemma to them and learns Mars, Earth, and even the Milky Way are unknown to Vinyi civilization. The marooned hero must convince them she has worth and value as a sapient being, not just a lab specimen. The fast-paced plotline, conveyed in a direct, nonjargony prose (some may recall genre master Alan Dean Foster), has much in common with the “Robinsonade” type of SF, in which a resourceful human fights to navigate and survive a perilous alien environment. That this one is a dicey ship-board society and culture rather than a hostile planetary body makes author Weber's material more nuanced, and much weight is accorded to the emotional states of the players (human and nonhuman), even with a rather too-neat action wrap-up.
Aye, Captain, there is intelligent life in this involving SF adventure.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798218472634
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Sicilia Stories
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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