A speculative take on space exploration that is more manifesto than adventure yarn.
In Solomon’s SF novel, members of a high-achieving family embark upon a controversial project to colonize outer space and preserve the self-destructive human race.
The children of the Arvad family are members of Generation Z with strong scientific leanings sharpened by participation in school STEM contests. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they are dismayed to perceive the U.S. moving backward as aggressive anti-science ignorance, homophobia, antisemitism, police brutality, deepfake hoaxes, and false claims by politicians (Donald Trump and Republicans are called out) signal cultural regression. Liz Arvad, a paramedic, is ambushed by a paranoid vaccination-denying gunman. She recovers (with PTSD) to further her studies in medicine and beyond. Liz and her extended family sign a pact to make the future a better place, and in subsequent years her younger sister, Aster, studies astrophysics at UC-Berkeley while their cousin Milo is drawn to progressive politics. It transpires that Liz, Aster and Milo have all been groomed by their grandfather, working in cahoots with online-retail tycoon Quentin Quixote (an idealized Jeff Bezos-type) to colonize space. The Arvads also help found a science-grounded Planet Party as a positive political force and a social-media/broadcast entity called The Planet Channel to counter propaganda. Violent reactionaries (the “Proud Earthers”) and religious zealots oppose them. The narrative reads less like a thriller than a blend of STEM facts, footnotes, bullet-pointed charts, op-eds, and utopian what-ifs rendered in a diary-like format by various characters. Passages of excited speculation (“If cultured meat could replace livestock production, the resulting four billion hectares of land—no longer needed for grazing and growing animal feed—could be used to plant six-trillion new trees”) propel the story. The narrative voice is YA-friendly, though it’s worth noting that the student-age characters grow into sexually active adults. The title chillingly refers to a 2017 warning from physicist Stephen Hawking cautioning that, due to mishandled AI, climate change, and other self-inflicted pathologies, the human race could die out within a century.
A speculative take on space exploration that is more manifesto than adventure yarn.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781960299932
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Munn Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2025
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 fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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