An intriguing but intensely violent SF tale.
An agent must save a primitive race from repressive overlords in this religious/SF adventure.
In 2024, an alien signal breached every device on Earth capable of transmitting sound. The signal contained the words warand omim. This caused the world’s governments to unite around the notions that alien contact would be disastrous and that humanity must remain hidden from extraterrestrial civilizations. A group called the Saganites rejected this decision. These followers of famed science educator Carl Sagan wanted to contact aliens by any means necessary. Now, in 3024, humanity has colonized Mars. Agent Adam McShane of the Space Intelligence Agency has just celebrated his 50th birthday on Sex Club Row in Texopolis (formerly Texas, now a giant metropolis). In six months, he plans to retire from the SIA. Yet when Blue, the central government’s artificial intelligence, assigns him to stop a “SETI violation code six,” he has no choice but to accept the mission. Adam joins agents DeMartin and Vasquez in assaulting the Saganites’ secret Mars base. In the ensuing chaos, Adam is trapped on the rebel ship as it launches for Omega, the omim signal’s planet of origin. Miraculously, he survives the trip to Omega while a Saganite rebel rests in a hibernation chamber aboard. Her name is Lilith Sands, and Adam is immediately struck by her youth and beauty as she wakes. But she blames him for the death of her mate, Moksha the Seer, with whom she planned to greet the aliens of Omega. Now, the pair must navigate an untamed world full of primitive and dangerous creatures. Watching their progress is Sheeol, leader of the colonizing Omim race, who has dark designs for humanity.
McGruther’s tale will remind longtime SF fans of a classic Star Trek television episode in which Capt. James T. Kirk’s machismo saves the day. A tonal update to the formula adds plenty of violence and viscera, as the theoretically immortal Omim enact and survive punishments like villains from a 1980s action film. In one scene, “blown-apart Omim fragments formed into long centipedes with tiny human hands...scratching and clawing with razor-sharp nails.” The author also writes beautifully about alien worlds, as when Adam stares into the starlit night and “the cosmos...started to merge with the translucent slugs in the foreground, making it feel like I was hallucinating, watching the sky melt and drip in a cosmic dance.” Unfortunately, the cast is packed with caricatures. Adam is a “gentleman” who tries to treat Lilith deferentially, yet when he offers her assistance, she replies: “I don’t need a man to save me.” The only element more intrusive in this narrative than shallow gender politics is the attempt at religiosity. When the pair finds fresh water, Lilith says: “Oh, thank goodness.” Adam corrects her with “Thank God.” As for the Omim, they possess androgynous beauty and cloven hooves like the devil, and they literally eat souls. Whether these elements taken together play as horror or comedy will vary among readers. One motif that isn’t ambiguous is McGruther’s philosophical overreach in positing the supremacy of Christian values in a gore-laden genre novel. If Adam and Lilith had no Omim enemies to battle in converting the Omegans to God’s flock, they might have simply handed out copies of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian.
An intriguing but intensely violent SF tale.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-36262-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Hosel & Ferrule Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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