A kinetic and sharply written space opera.
Enhanced virtual reality technology threatens to destroy the real world in Cumby’s series-launching SF debut.
Fifteen-year-old Fiona Martinez, who uses a wheelchair, and her twin brother, Francis, are consummate and avid video gamers. But they’re ill-prepared for a bizarre mission they receive while immersed in the popular online role-playing game Longstar. Someone from the company that created Longstar calls and begs the pair to save the enigmatic Analise, who’s “something new”: neither an avatar (like the twins’ in-game characters) nor an AI–controlled bot. In a concurrent plot, in the simulated universe of havencosm, 19-year-old Kwon Se-Jong is smitten with Nkiru Anaya and happily joins her on a church-sanctioned pilgrimage from Earth to other planets, including Grone. Powering both this VR world and Longstar are the QARMA engines—the same supercomputers that the U.S. military employs for “ultrarealistic wargame simulations.” A threat looms, as the intermingling of these worlds, coupled with a virus infecting the game servers, may somehow be responsible for a recent uptick of sunspots and earthquakes in the real world. Cumby’s spirited, impressive worldbuilding packs this first installment with incident, from Longstar’s frenzied gameplay to the interplanetary journey in havencosm. This keeps the novel moving at a steady clip despite its more than 600-page length; even passages of exposition, such as an explanation of the QARMA engines, come with spry dialogue and intriguing narrative details. The stellar cast of characters includes a likable game designer and an uncompromising former dark-web hacker. The author doesn’t take long to link the dual plotlines, but there’s still plenty of mystery as well as a few shocks along the way. This book’s ending offers a surprising amount of closure, though copious virtual worlds remain for sequels to explore.
A kinetic and sharply written space opera.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798987522714
Page Count: 662
Publisher: Broken Monolith
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
PERSPECTIVES
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