Inventive, intelligent sci-fi about humans grappling with an oceanic world.
In this debut novel, a Postbox transports future government auditor Sero Novak to a colony on a water planet.
With a duplicate body printed for him by a Postbox and his mind uploaded into his newly made brain, Novak is mentally connected with the rest of the Race—humanity—by a NeuroVision memory linkup. His vital mission is to learn what has happened to the colonists on the water planet NineDee and how their efforts to tame the primitive ocean-bound world have progressed. As Novak explores NineDee and gets to know the people who live there, he encounters the dangers of the indigenous life forms and the environment—and uncovers weirder and weirder secrets about the colonists themselves, culminating in a terrible revelation that forces him to take desperate action. With humans having survived an economic apocalypse to rebuild a better society, but one still with deep-rooted dissension and selfishness, will they carry their petty desires and desperate wishes across the galaxy? And will Novak be able to act in the best interests of all of humanity in the face of his own slipping ideals as well as the destructive passions of the people sent to build their outposts among the distant stars? Tyson makes ambitious choices and trusts the reader to be smart enough to follow his narrative. While the characters are human and three-dimensional and the dialogue clean but slightly didactic, the pace is measured and the setting descriptions are complex and challenging. Little effort is made to clarify terms and ideas as they are first presented, and readers must infer and learn as they progress. Luckily, the demands made on readers are well-rewarded. But given the dense approach to worldbuilding in the novel, it is difficult to know if the author’s lapses into contemporary diction and behavior are virtues or flaws (“She says she feels the same about me. You’ll see, Minnus. We just…pop!”). Other contemporary pop-culture references (“frak,” “Gigantor,” etc.) are jarring and have less potential defense.
Inventive, intelligent sci-fi about humans grappling with an oceanic world.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5351-6397-2
Page Count: 524
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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