A sprightly, complicated cast propels this futuristic tale.
In this prospective SF series launch, Earthling prisoners embark on a risky interplanetary voyage to establish a civilization on another world.
It’s the day of Floridian death-row inmate Shelton Keyes’ scheduled execution when he gets a shot at a reprieve: A representative from the International Office of Special Science offers to transfer him to a self-governing “experimental prison.” Shelton and more than 60 fellow convicts are given a mission to locate uncharted, potentially habitable planets. Their endeavor may save humanity, as Earth, decades after its moon went dark, is now periodically hit with “crushing” arctic winters. Each module houses eight inmates in individual tuna-can-shaped cells, and they’re destined to go through a portal that the U.S. Navy and the IOSS have already discovered. Shelton and his seven module companions, however, are unexpectedly separated from the rest, and they barely make it to a celestial body. The seven men accompanying Shelton are a varied lot, including easygoing Sal Combes, book-smart Bel Chichacott, and Degory Rodriguez, a man of few words (for a frightening reason). The inmates try to determine where exactly they ended up, and they want to ensure that their newfound home can sustain human lives. Meanwhile, they wonder if the multicolored planet in the sky is where the other prisoners went. The crewmembers settle in as best as they can, despite a string of unpredictable storms and days and nights that are noticeably longer than Earth’s. Their greatest challenge, though, is a sudden menace from an unlikely source—one they may not be able to overcome.
Heasley presents readers with a story, set in an unspecified future time, that’s ultimately more of a character study than a tale of survival. Shelton and the others occasionally spin off into philosophical musings, which makes sense, as they’re coming to grips with the fact that they now have a second chance at life. They also eagerly brave an unknown locale to help others start anew; “our planet” is how Bel describes it, and they name nearly every landmark they see. However, the environment isn’t as harsh as readers may anticipate; although there are rounds of floods and tsunamis, all that Shelton and the others have to do is take refuge inside their air-conditioned cells. Nevertheless, a sense of conflict between the inmates is skillfully woven into the narrative; the men begin as relative strangers, and just because they must rely on one another doesn’t mean they’re entirely trusting. Shelton, for one, sleeps with a knife under his pillow, taken from his cell’s toolbox. Frequent dialogue begets further revelations, as the men talk about loved ones they’ve lost, or, in Shelton’s case, the crime that put them behind bars. Overall, this book proves to be a surprisingly quick read, considering the narrative’s scope and the setting’s massive size. Its dedicated focus on the eight explorers, some of whom don’t make it to the end, gives it a genuine appeal. Moreover, there are plenty of unexplained details for potential sequels to explore, including the fate of other prisoners.
A sprightly, complicated cast propels this futuristic tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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