More a New Age encyclopedic exegesis than standard ufology.
An Earth man is befriended by advanced, peaceful, human-like space beings who teach him about their spirituality and science.
Hawnser claims to have associated with alien beings, but his book, a translation of his 1997 manuscript La Respuesta, casts his revelations as a largely plotless tutorial novel. Its value resides in the reader’s openness to the instruction. In 1989, protagonist Eric encounters a flying saucer and its occupants, including a lovely uniformed female, Mirza, and her male cohort, Rahel. Via meetings, teleportations and dream-state visions, they instruct Eric about the aliens’ Big Picture. The gist is this: Earth is on the verge of a “New Era,” but is still too “backwards” to merit open alien contact. It’s one of the 619 planets in this galaxy with “human” populations. There is not actually one universe but seven, grouped around God’s headquarters. Civilizations achieving Nirvana-like equilibrium based on virtue, science and love, enjoy long lives, harmony with nature, telepathic communication, a cash-free economy, travel on conveyor-belt networks, transcendence to better dimensions and other wonders. Earth’s people can progress to such a ”super-man” stage by obeying teachings of Micael, aka Jesus of Nazareth, who was one of many Micael messiahs sent by the Creator to elevate the inhabited worlds. Quantum mechanics and physics of the micro-cosmos, explained by the author with various charts and drawings (ditto the accommodations aboard the saucers), are key to unifying science and religion. Faith, despite the mention of Jesus, takes on an Eastern tone, with talk of chakra energy, dharma, karma and reincarnation. What of the rumors casting aliens as menacing, black-eyed, silent beings abducting and anal-probing victims in UFO lore? Irresponsible science-fiction, writes Hawnser. Some may find Hawnser’s own aliens a bit Starfleet-like, right down to a non-intervention policy in Earth affairs (except via messengers such as Eric). As for solid proof of his allegations, Hawnser—who admires skeptic-scientists like Carl Sagan—only promises future discoveries, such as stars apparently predating the Big Bang, that will shore up this cosmology. Astrophysics passages are probably the most accessible to general readers, whilst the majority proposes a U(FO)topian manifesto exhorting its disciples to wisdom.
More a New Age encyclopedic exegesis than standard ufology.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1426914478
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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