It’s terrific good fun, for all its sobering message. And if you want to learn how to stop that streetcar with a worm, well,...
Blending comics, online game and real-life IT security drills, this app is just the thing for the budding National Security Agency tech—or black-hat hacker.
To call Coleman’s project ambitious is to get only halfway to the point: Crossing media and platforms, it urgently aims to instruct readers/users in the realities of cyberterrorism, the better to combat it. Sometimes, as with the Anarchist Cookbook of yore, it seemingly threatens to instruct them in how to commit it—but there’s good reason for all that verisimilitude. This German-crafted app opens in the Berlin of the near future, when a deeply secret security company, its chiseled techno-wizards a collection of groovy chicks in thigh boots and lank-haired keyboard jockeys, comes up against a bunch of very bad people who style themselves Black Flag. On the good side is uber-nerd Max Parsons, whose parents were done in by one such very bad person—and there’s no surer way, readers of comic books will know, to create a superhero than to kill his or her mom and dad. In this set of episodes, Max and company are recruited to take part in a training exercise that involves launching a cyberattack on various elements of the infrastructure in poor, unoffending Sweden and Norway. But is it an exercise, really? Who knows about it, and who would want to take down a streetcar in Oslo? The app has the production values of a good movie, complete with 3-D effects, an easily navigated series of screens, and plenty of opportunities to drill down and learn its abundant hidden features. These include some carefully written notes about the reality of cyberterrorism, the certainty that it will be ever more prevalent and the effects of its actions: “Both our societal and economic systems would quickly collapse without access to water,” for instance.
It’s terrific good fun, for all its sobering message. And if you want to learn how to stop that streetcar with a worm, well, here’s your how-to.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bastei Luebbe GmbH & Co. KG
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
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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