A high-quality anthology with a Christian outlook that embraces science.
Wilkie’s collection of five SF/fantasy stories run the gamut from alien first contact to the second coming.
In “Once Upon a Helix,” Gunther Trent is an astronomer maintaining the SETI vigil for signals from extraterrestrials. He finally logs recurring, rhythmic coded pulses from a distant star. He also encounters molecular biologist Catherine Arkette, who’s researching anomalous Region X DNA that only humans possess. It turns out they each have the key to the other’s riddle, but the answer is not what they’d like it to be. In “The Goldfire Project,” artist/composer/writer Edwards is offered a chance to cheat imminent death by being the first man to have his consciousness uploaded into a digital environment. But an artificial intelligence named Goldfire already inhabits the target cyberspace. In “Half the Sky,” human colonists have spent a millennium on a narrow, habitable strip of territory on a distant planet; on one side is harsh heat, and on the other, chilly darkness. Madison Mills, an 18-year-old orphan, leaves a convent-run orphanage and learns that she’s the product of a doomed marriage between a woman from the Shade side and a man of the Sun. In “The Wishbringer,” journalist Jonathan Argent teleports to different parts of the multiverse to deliver thrilling accounts to readers. His latest trip takes him to a farmer who looks after wishes and prayers brought from Earth by archangels. Some reach fruition; others wither. Argent asks for his own wish, but being part of the story has unintended effects. “The Last Sunday of Summer” takes place largely on the colony planet Solus II, where a future Catholic Church is losing influence to a revamped religion based on rumors that a new Christ returned to Old Earth with a different, suppressed Gospel. A young novice nun gets involved in deadly intrigue over a surviving religious relic.
In an afterword, Wilkie reveals that some of this material is connected to fictional universes in her earlier collection, Seven Sides of Self: Stories (2019), with some tales serving as prequels of sequels. However, the set here may still be enjoyed as stand-alone works. All of the various tales end with a Bible verse, although the spiritual components of the stories are not always immediately obvious. Indeed, the final story, which directly addresses Christianity and puts it front and center, is probably the one that will most scandalize readers from a more traditionally minded faith-based demographic, with its suggestions that Jesus not only was scientifically minded—and inspired a faith that, as one character puts it, “places the laws of physics in greater reverence than the grace of God”—but also had to simplify his message all those centuries ago in Galilee. Other tales here offer deep dives into genetics, exotic planetary environments, and the logistics imposed by the vastness of space travel. Along the way, the five works here offer readers remarkable flights of imagination, occasional surprises, and an overarching sense of wonder. A high-quality anthology with a Christian outlook that embraces science.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781647424541
Page Count: 253
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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