The rare SF yarn that emphasizes the positive.
Astronauts encounter aliens offering to share technology and resources in Golden’s SF novel.
Tom Whitaker is an American nuclear scientist (and recent divorce casualty) working on ways to make nuclear fusion a clean-energy technology to conserve dwindling fossil fuels. A key to his project is restarting NASA moon-shot missions to mine a helium isotope only found beneath the lunar surface. Against political opposition, U.S. president William B. Ferris agrees. The official go-ahead allows Tom to hope he can reignite his relationship with an old college flame, Theresa McDonnough, now a NASA pilot—but she repeatedly cools his jets. Then, the incredible happens: On the moon, humanoid aliens from the Cygnus constellation casually introduce themselves. Cygnans are six-fingered, with funky eyes, and they claim to live in an unstable binary-star system at the far end of a wormhole. Having observed humankind for generations, the Cygnans propose a joint human-alien venture to share tech and the precious helium that will both help the nuclear-fusion breakthrough and aid the Cygnans in relocating their endangered civilization. But xenophobic humans—not just conspiracy freaks, but also respected astrophysicists and opinion-leaders—mistrust the extraterrestrials; the alien representatives seem cordial, but their society remains a closed book. Tom personally finds his ex-wife strategically leveraging his closeness with an amiable alien named Lanjo in their custody fight over their daughter Stephanie. Occasional deposits of hard-SF jargon (“Cygnan technology created a trap that cools the antiprotons and combines them with positrons to create antihydrogen, keeping the antimatter confined and preventing their annihilation”) give rise to some small bumps in an otherwise smoothly told tale that accents emotions, relationships, and good feelings—characters break out occasionally in the “Snoopy happy dance.” The Cygnans may inspire only muted wonder in readers (proud of his human pop-culture savvy, Lanjo speaks in language that tilts deliberately toward pop-culture references and cliches like “a friend in need is a friend indeed”). Despite episodes of deadly sabotage and hints that rogue Cygnans may have their own hostile agenda, “group hugs all around” is the prevailing sentiment.
The rare SF yarn that emphasizes the positive.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2021
ISBN: 9781956891027
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Golden Cross Ranch
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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