An engrossing, if sometimes overly talkative, tale of a groundbreaking inventor.
An SF novel focuses on an unconventional inventor and his remarkable creation.
McConnell’s book takes the form of an autobiography of his main character, born Tom Spoon and renamed Tom Maloof after the famous woodworker Sam Maloof. Sam not only gave Tom a glimmer of future promise while he was languishing in a boys home, but also used his influence to gain the teen admission to a university. Even in those early years, Tom is an engagingly self-effacing character, often reflecting on his life. “I would think of how things would be different if I had grown up in a normal family,” he muses at one point. “I would later learn that no family is ever normal.” Tom goes on to invent a miraculous device called the Gene Rasp, a way to manipulate genes, “a tool that could cull the chaff from the wheat.” The invention can effectively reengineer individual genetics, offering a cure not only for cancer, but for all kinds of genetic deviations and medical problems as well. Around this narrative center, McConnell expands two larger stories: one involving Tom and the intriguing friends and colleagues he makes along the way and the other indulging in a great deal of his own digressions on a wide variety of scientific, personal, and even philosophical topics. “The longer the distance the stranger the memory,” he observes. “Memory is fractal, splintering and glimmering and cascading.” A lot of the ambitious and thought-provoking story reflects that kind of cascade. The author is a generally entertaining writer throughout the fictional memoir, delivering many rich details. But he sometimes displays a weakness for throwaway clichés (“The mind is not only a terrible thing to waste,” he writes at one point, “it’s a very difficult thing to understand”), and he underestimates how distracting the myriad digressions can be. The intricate text includes not only copious amounts of poetry, but also frequent URL links and scanning tags designed to share key songs and sound clips with readers.
An engrossing, if sometimes overly talkative, tale of a groundbreaking inventor.Pub Date: July 15, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-66-637197-8
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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