Cautionary global warming SF that eschews shrillness for efficient storytelling.
In a future rocked by climate disaster and social division, a member of one of Earth’s ruling oligarchs leaves his enclave to see the blighted world outside.
Seidel’s SF novel is a chronological successor to his earlier 2045 (2009), though the ties are mainly thematic. By 2145, billions of deaths have resulted from greenhouses gases and unregulated industry. Tectonic upheavals linked to continents unburdened by long-melted glaciers have caused a landmass called Tang to rise in the sea. Because Tang didn’t fall under any one nation’s jurisdiction, it was commandeered by 100 elite families who now dwell there in luxury, running the world’s politics and economy remotely while the rest of humanity suffers under the stewardship of lackeys and corrupt politicians. Sheltered young Tangian Ron Neuwirth, gifted with “nascent common sense” despite his privilege, wants to see North America. Ron’s immense wealth helps him cross the Balkanized boundaries of the former United States and to enter arid semi-lawless areas. During his odyssey, he discovers romance (with a contaminated vaccine victim), dire shortages, and income inequality. Recycled goods, meat substitutes, and bans on cars are common, but they’re only last-ditch retrenchments against 120-degree heat, toxic rivers, fuel exhaustion, pandemics, and social unraveling. Where capitalism remains, there is infrastructure and function. (Chicago, headquarters of the prosperous National Rifle Association, prides itself on its mass murders.) But whole swaths of “Lowmerica” are dangerous, prowled by the new alpha predator: pythons. The dystopian narrative doomscrolls through a grim future; some of the details are insightful and intriguing (like the ubiquity of spelt, a grain that can grow in harsh environments), whereas most are depressing. The material can feel like a moral parable crossed with an Al Gore PowerPoint presentation, but Seidel keeps the story streamlined and compact and leavens the bitterness with a possibility of hope in the end. One chapter, told entirely from the perspective of a hungry python, particularly stands out for its strikingly divergent tone and style. Fittingly, the book is issued via a sustainability nonprofit.
Cautionary global warming SF that eschews shrillness for efficient storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2022
ISBN: 9781732993334
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Steady State Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2026
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
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
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