Really cleans up your neural-imaging system with radiant tensile energy.
Strongly styled SF debut with big echoes of The Matrix Trilogy and the Philip K. Dick flicks Blade Runner and Minority Report.
Dr. Alden Cray (wry and smirking from his Bruce Willis implant?) is a security agent in Corporate Special Services (CSS), which headquarters itself in a 450-story building in the massive cityplex of Kuala Lumpur. He works for very intelligent Phao Yin, head of CSS, the security branch of the Collective. We meet Cray chasing the amazingly dynamic information-smuggler Zoe through Singapore’s suborbital transport center. When Zoe is killed, her flesh shrinks to the skin. Her bloodstream is full of flash, a cellular information drug found in the life force’s information centers and also alive and expanding as free-floating information, replicating and expanding until it has entered the very matrix of creation and perhaps is now taking over. The Collective thinks that flash can be a useful drug, properly handled. But was it created by Inru, the anti-technology terrorists out to sink the Collective by turning information against itself and against the evil rulers of commerce? Or did Heretic, a splinter group, create it? In his cloaked past before turning spook for CSS, Cray was Vortex, the planet’s top hammerjack, illegally breaking down code. Now called to Vienna’s rebuilt Oldtown by the Assembly, which is housed in floors fathomlessly deep under the Vienna Opera House, Cray meets humorless free agent Avalon, who was blinded and nearly died from a virus on the moon and now wears a superhuman black sensuit to see with (the Carrie-Anne Moss role). And now rival synthetically intelligent computers arise, Lyssa versus Inru’s bionucleic technology. As he and Avalon head for New York and he trolls the Axis for leads, Cray is invited by Heretic to subvert the Collective and join the Ascension. But then New York’s bionucleic Works lab is sabotaged and the Collective’s lonely Lyssa computer personally calls for Cray to help her search for The Other.
Really cleans up your neural-imaging system with radiant tensile energy.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-38331-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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