An uneven collection whose flashes of profundity are too often doused by dispassion.
All our worst dystopian fears are realized in this grim collection.
McHugh’s stories (many previously published in SF and fantasy magazines) depict the many faces of social collapse. Worst-case scenarios abound: bird flu epidemics, dirty bombs, plagues spread by chicken nuggets, Mexican drug cartels and computer systems morphing into something sentient and malign. "The Naturalist" is set in the zombie preserve formerly known as Cleveland, where, during another Supreme Court retrenchment of constitutional protections for prison inmates, convicts are dumped to fend for themselves. The story’s protagonist, Cahill, finds he actually enjoys feeding his fellow prisoners to the zombies, like a bemused birder setting out suet. "Special Economics" takes the plight of Chinese factory workers to extreme lengths—they have to moonlight illegally to pay off their ever-mounting debt to their employer. The rather wan "Going to France" loses momentum after a few Francophiles take wing without benefit of aircraft. "The Kingdom of the Blind" is merely tedious, mimicking David Foster Wallace with none of his complexity or humor, and "After the Apocalypse" and "The Naturalist" cover George Saunders territory without his excoriating wit. The stories are more poignant when their premises are less speculative. In "Useless Things," a sculptor living hand to mouth in Albuquerque discovers that the hobo code is now online and that fashioning dildos is a more profitable e-business than creating life-like infant dolls—her life off the grid is dictated by the present-day economy rather than by disaster or pestilence. In "Honeymoon," a woman who narrowly misses settling for marriage to a loser confronts the vagaries of chance when she volunteers for a deadly drug trial. Although an imaginary (for now) food-borne disease is the catalyst for "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," the real catharsis inheres in the conflicting intentions of Irene, the daughter of an estranged lesbian couple, and her mother’s new partner Alice, a hoarder.
An uneven collection whose flashes of profundity are too often doused by dispassion.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-931520-29-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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