Fasten your seat belts and adjust your tray tables; this SF tale offers an exciting ride.
A scientist’s daughter quietly refines quantum human teleportation and teams up with a venture capitalist, but their plan hits deadly turbulence when the predatory CEO of an airline corporation tries to violently hijack the technology.
Heaton’s first installment of The Race Is On techno-thriller series is set in 2002-03, a pivotal time for the protagonists—and the airline industry, a key villain. A slump in air transport following the terrorist atrocities of 9/11 means America’s once-mighty Reynolds Air faces financial ruin. CEO Samuel Reynolds III sees an opportunity to revitalize the ailing company (and save his own reputation). It seems that in Iceland, Uma Jacobsdottir, a pretty, green-minded activist and daughter of a great quantum physicist, has secretly perfected teleportation—the near-instantaneous breakdown and reassembly of atomic matter (including humans) at “LEAP” portals, even at vast distances. The technology has astounding and disturbing applications and implications, but Uma wants to restrict it to long-range transport, eliminating fossil fuels and carbon emissions. She enlists Ethan Rae, a shadowy but ethical venture capitalist from England, to take the discovery public (“Your approach to business benefits everyone, especially the less well-off”). But ruthless Reynolds wants to monopolize LEAP for pure profit, sending hit men and hackers on the attack. Ethan hastily teleports during the crisis, experiencing side effects somewhat familiar to readers of the classic SF short story “The Fly” and viewers of the film adaptations. But here, the result is a strategic advantage, not a monster mutation. The international novel is a page-turner with bigger-than-life heroes and villains, rousing action, aerospace history, a built-in Icelandic travelogue, captivating SF concepts, and joyous storytelling (though important bits of backstory remain conspicuously scattered in the author’s 2022 prequel novella, MAD). Despite the airline business tycoons’ being portrayed as scoundrels, this volume is ideal in-flight diversion fare, worthy of those concourse gift-shop spinner racks full of novels by Alistair MacLean, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler. Heaton fact-checks his science and settings in an afterword and invites readers to support him if they want to see the saga continue. It’s likely that most will.
Fasten your seat belts and adjust your tray tables; this SF tale offers an exciting ride. (science fiction)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9780956172020
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Rookwood Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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