A richly imagined SF novel of gaming, economics, and attempted coups that offers a good return on readers’ investment.
In Schultz’s SF novel, a high-tech athlete finds herself caught in power plays between political elites and would-be usurpers in a world ruled by cryptocurrency and deadly sports gambling.
Teenage Miranda was unwilling to accept a life as a downtrodden factory worker, as her parents had, so she left home and, over a 10-year span, reinvented herself as “Arrow,” a rising star in the hugely popular game BreakPoint, which involves one-on-one, sometimes-fatal gladiatorial battles, assisted by high technology. Practically everyone gambles on BreakPoint bouts (as well as on random street duels, officiated by patrol drone-robots), which sometimes affect the fates of billions. (“BreakPoint was so lucrative that nations regularly adjusted their election dates to accommodate major tournaments.”) Meanwhile, the island-state Char is an international hub, thanks to its control of the CIN token, a universal crypto-coinage; BreakPoint is a key source of CIN’s value. Arrow owes much of her success to a mysterious longtime patron, Sage, who reveals herself as a political exile and long-lost sister of Char’s “First Citizen” despot, Violet. Sage and her cohorts are determined to reform, or at least overthrow, the establishment with a strategy that partially requires Arrow, via BreakPoint, to manipulate the CIN market. But as the would-be coup unfolds, Arrow realizes that her role as a symbolic girl-of-the-people may be enabling a system that seemingly victimizes everyone. Schultz evokes an Earth-like world of the future with such recognizable dystopian touches as rising sea levels and massive wealth gaps. Economics has often lurked in the background of SF worldbuilding—as in Frank Herbert’s Dune books—but here, such financial matters come to the fore. With its large ensemble cast (including a memorable AI), this lengthy, complex saga takes a while to get readers invested—but once it does, the material takes the kinds of transfixing twists and turns that money can’t buy. BreakPoint itself remains semi-abstruse; perhaps it’s best imagined as a computer-assisted battlefield-chess simulation—with the occasional option to try to physically kill one’s opponent.
A richly imagined SF novel of gaming, economics, and attempted coups that offers a good return on readers’ investment.Pub Date: July 31, 2024
ISBN: 9798991099318
Page Count: 522
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2026
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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
