Nuclear holocaust, savagery, and space aliens converge on Cleveland in a competent start to a five-part series.
After a nuclear strike ravages the world, suburbanites in northeast Ohio struggle in a harsh new environment of subsistence-survival and murderous gangs—unaware that an alien spaceship is en route.
Author Wood (Trash, 2018, etc.) begins his sci-fi pentalogy with a narrative that is unequally split between pulpy post-apocalyptic action-survival and alien first-contact. In the near future, Islamist fanatics in Tadzhikistan launch an all-out nuclear strike using high-yield weapons and electromagnetic pulse bombs bought from Russia and China (the terrorists have no compunction about firing the warheads right back at Russia and China). All global communications cease, and most major world cities are atomized, though the worst of the thermonuclear holocaust spares much of the American Midwest. Still, with food shipments, goods, and government authority all but extinct, civilization quickly degrades into gang looting and barbarism. Just to the west of Cleveland, Taylor MacPherson is a mild-mannered engineer, reluctantly thrust into a role of local protector and leader of his community when area biker gangs and lowlifes start raping and pillaging. Successfully beating back marauders with improvised weapons and barricades, Taylor and his fellow suburbanites begin the task of restarting organized society, with currency, taxes, and courts. Meanwhile, however, in deep space, a bizarre, egg-laying hermaphroditic species called the Qu’uda have just detected their first transmissions from Earth (which they call Kota). The possibility of a habitable planet—strategically important now that the Qu’uda are in a state of hostilities with another space-going race—sparks a long-distance expedition to the Kota system. Wood tells his prepper yarn in effective, get-the-job-done prose reminiscent of Alistair MacLean. Sympathy is generated for the hero and his cohorts, and Taylor is a regular-fellow type surprised by how quickly he accommodates violence and survivalist pragmatism when he must. As thinly shaded as the ET stuff is in this kickoff, the question of whether the Qu’uda will turn out friend or foe here makes for a tantalizing one in the view of the saga. Northeast Ohio readers and armchair Cleveland tourists (if any) will be interested in the ways Wood works the geography of that much-besmirched city into the plotline.
Nuclear holocaust, savagery, and space aliens converge on Cleveland in a competent start to a five-part series.Pub Date: June 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-387-33591-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Faucett Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
