Clumsy in parts but, overall, a lot of fun.
Kidnapped astronauts find themselves in a mysterious city on one of Jupiter's moons.
Sociologist Nalini Jackson landed a gig that many of her colleagues would envy: She's undertaking “an intensive field study of social dynamics” on a NASA cryoship orbiting Jupiter. The problem, she soon realizes, is that she doesn’t like people all that much, especially most of the overgrown frat-boy types who are her shipmates. Things get worse when their ship is suddenly taken by mysterious forces to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and they find themselves in New Roanoke, “an American city of at least a million. On a freaking moon, 444 million miles away, for chrissakes. In a bubble. City streets. Expressways. Parks.” They’re made to attend an orientation, where a supervisor tells them, “You can either let it drive you crazy for the rest of your life—and it can—or you can just go with the flow and make the most of this. Do like the locals do: Accept it and live your life. You got no choice; this is your home now.” The ship’s mission leader, Bob Seaford, takes this advice and gets involved in the community’s ruling party, while Nalini’s friend Dwayne Causwell goes the other way, plotting to escape the city with a ragtag group of dissidents. Meanwhile, a crew consisting of a NASA admiral, a businessman, and his dopey assistant embark on a voyage to rescue the kidnapped astronauts, who find themselves dealing with “invisible things,” mysterious gravitational forces that the people of New Roanoke refuse to discuss. There’s a lot going on in this book, and the results are mixed. As a satire of American politics and class issues, it’s a little too obvious and clumsy. But as a science-fiction novel, it’s saved by Johnson’s charismatic writing and sense of humor. (“So we missed sentient life—so what?” Nalini tells Dwayne early in the book. “Have you ever met sentient life? A lot of them are assholes.”) The book doesn’t quite live up to its high ambitions, and it’s far from Johnson’s best work, but it’s still unquestionably entertaining.
Clumsy in parts but, overall, a lot of fun.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-22925-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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