by Meg Elison ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2019
A thoughtful extrapolation of contemporary gender and sexuality issues in need of wider discussion and understanding.
The restless conclusion of The Road to Nowhere trilogy, set generations after a virulent disease killed most men and even more women, making women a precious commodity and childbirth a hazardous enterprise.
Flora, a transwoman raised as a sex slave, tells her story from essentially two points of view: as an old woman writing her autobiography after many years of residence on Bambritch (Bainbridge) Island near Settle (Seattle) as an invasion looms; and as a younger woman continuing the plot from The Book of Etta (2017), sprinkled with memories of her difficult childhood and adolescence. Having killed the Estiel (St. Louis) warlord known as the Lion, the survivors of his harem have taken somewhat uneasy refuge in the underground town of Ommun, a matriarchal Mormon community led by Alma, whose many successful pregnancies and supposedly divine visions have led her followers to believe her a prophet. Flora; her lover Alice, a skilled herbalist and occasional abortionist; the transman Eddy, Flora’s unrequited love and one of Alice’s other lovers; and a small group of followers reject Alma’s theocratic governance and return to the world above, where they search for somewhere that will allow them to live without the threat of slavers and rigid expectations of gender and sexuality. The market is currently flooded with dystopias in which women are valued for their breeding and rarity as sexual receptacles, where the divide between women and men has grown and the definition of gender is more rigidly reinforced. This series, and this book in particular, refreshingly argues that despite violent opposition, an imbalance in the number of women and men might offer more freedom for some to make their own definitions of gender, sexuality, and selfhood and that even in a world where fertility is damaged and pregnancy a risk, one doesn’t need to devote oneself to having or facilitating the having of babies to be valuable. If the story has a flaw, it is the author’s penchant to suddenly introduce a meaty bit of plot just before the book ends and then quickly conclude without fully exploring it.
A thoughtful extrapolation of contemporary gender and sexuality issues in need of wider discussion and understanding.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4209-3
Page Count: 332
Publisher: 47North
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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by Meg Elison
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2015
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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