A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.
In Arthur’s sci-fi debut, humanoid aliens have arrived on Earth, offering miraculous technology, but young Jack Cousins knows they can’t be trusted.
Aliens, virtually indistinguishable from Homo sapiens, announce themselves on Earth in Las Vegas. They soon fill the marketplace with must-have toys exhibiting amazing tech that even the CIA can’t duplicate. The extraterrestrials explain they are welcoming man into the Directory, a vast federation of intelligent worlds. Their superscience soon ends Earth’s wars, poverty and disease. The aliens recruit thousands of young humans for “training” and ship them off-world to supposedly utopian destinations. Clean-cut Utah teen Jack Cousins, however, doesn’t believe in the visitors’ altruism. It turns out that Jack is the reincarnation of Tac-U-One, an alien troubleshooter secret agent who fatally crashed on Earth 16 years ago trying to expose a sinister scheme to corrupt the Directory and create a monstrous empire of slavery and exploitation. Jack becomes aware of this when he visits the site of Tac-U-One’s crash, and he embarks on a clever solo campaign against the invaders, using mind control, the media and legal maneuvering to nudge the aliens into revealing their unsavory true nature. Jack also tries to do right by his Earth family and his childhood sweetheart, Wendy, who are endangered by his resistance activities. Although the novel is geared to a YA audience, this series opener rarely talks down to its readers. Unlike other authors who have delved into the invasion genre, Arthur refreshingly avoids turning his novel into a tract on imperialism, colonialism or genocide. Indeed, notwithstanding some R-rated language and tastefully rendered acknowledgment of sex, readers may find it reminiscent of golden-age sci-fi tales of the 1950s. One detail does get short shrift in this outing: the fact that Directory society is built around the concept of reincarnation as an accepted reality. Future installments may expand upon that; the book ends with a peek at a planned sequel.
A solid launching pad for a sophisticated alien-invasion saga for older teens and adults.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466382510
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
