A quizzical, nonlinear journey through complicated SF plotlines involving philosophy and epistemology.
In Blair’s SF novel set around the 42nd century, the cult members of a human-settled planet launch a war of universal annihilation.
The author starts his time-leaping, dimension-folding epic “a few hundred years into the fourth millennium of the common era.” New Gwalintu, a human colony, claims supremacy over everything in the universe, with a faith based in part on archaeological evidence an advanced alien civilization once thrived on the planet. Organizing themselves into a dictatorship via the use of brain implants, the people of New Gwalintu wage war against all other civilizations, pursuing a mission of conquest and extinction. Behind the plentiful nuclear arsenal of New Gwalintu is a shadowy religious cult whose mental powers threaten to sunder the entire universe, which would leave the consciousness of New Gwalintu as the only entity left. The best minds on Earth counterattack in a “War Beyond Human Comprehension,” but they find that reality itself has become frayed. Some Earth heroes wind up in alternate universes; Ezra Kalkin, one defender, materializes on a parallel Earth where his own planet is the subject of a popular SF tale, and watching philosophical dissertations is a major pastime. Kalkin headlines the Alpha Conference, where he offers deep thoughts alongside a popular pair of shamans/comedians, which could prove crucial in the war effort. A team of hitmen await to assassinate Kalkin, but even they hang on his every wise word. The narrative then shifts to a team of 55th-century space explorers on a habitable planet, discovering an incredible pyramid covered with Dan Brown–esque symbols representing Earth culture, math/science and religion. An alien “Great Reverberating Voice” greets the amazed humans, ultimately transforming them into other beings to do good works. A final episode happens in 3534 on another variant Earth, involving an amazing prisoner from the dawn of time.
Readers who are expecting closure to the New Gwalintu plot thread will be disappointed. In prologues and epilogues, Blair acknowledges a wide spectrum of intriguing influences, ranging from classic SF author Arthur C. Clarke to director Alfred Hitchcock, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, actor Bette Davis, chess master Garry Kasparov, and even pop singer and actor Olivia Newton-John (whose first motion picture, 1970’s Toomorrow is an SF rock musical). However, this imaginative and ambitious work of fiction most readily brings to mind Count Jan Potocki’s mythic and famously unfinished The Saragossa Manuscript (1810), which codified a recursive, fabulist-fantasy genre narrative in which bizarre stories lead to even more stories—seemingly making no sense but all interconnected nonetheless. Such is the case in this novel, which offers readers an absurdist odyssey that also recalls James Joyce, Spike Milligan, Tom Robbins, and Kurt Vonnegut, by turns, with its puns, conspiracies, Eastern mysticism, transcriptions of sitcom and old-timey radio scripts, and its surprising reverence for religion. At the heart of this storm of concepts is what appears to be a loving homage to literary creativity and imagination itself.
A quizzical, nonlinear journey through complicated SF plotlines involving philosophy and epistemology.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798985909470
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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