It’s a shame that Baruth’s real strength as a character-driven storyteller is too often eclipsed by arid think-tank...
Baruth’s first full-length fiction (after linked stories and a novella, not reviewed) is an unsatisfying hybrid: a time-travel extravaganza that’s also a political novel featuring Bill Clinton.
It’s 2055, and the outlook for the US is dire. The Cigarette Wars have been going on for 30 years, the US is losing ground to the Sino-Russian Alliance, and whole swaths of the West are controlled by homegrown right-wing militias. The origins of the Wars lie in the Clinton Administration’s decision in the 1990s to push for NATO expansion (real) and the Anti-Tobacco Accords (invented). Go back in time, annul those decisions, and nip the Wars in the bud: the NSC in 2055 can do all that. The key figure is BC, still alive at 109 and working in Little Rock with narrator Sal Hayden, a female historian, his authorized biographer, and the world’s greatest expert on BC. The NSC needs Sal’s help as “script consultant,” so they lock down the Arkansas facility with a Clancyesque flourish and draft her, under protest. She has three handlers code-named James (for Carville), George (for Stephanopoulos), and Virginia, a “bodyist,” who will seduce—or kill—as directed. The four fly into 1963 Vegas to watch the Patterson-Liston fight (huh?) before their real assignment, recruiting/kidnapping the 16-year-old BC (yBC), who will then persuade his older 1995 self to scrap those decisions. It’s all baloney, of course, both as narrative (endless set-up, nonexistent payoff) and as geopolitics (Orwell’s 1984 with a high-tech gloss). What’s fresh, interestingly, is BC himself, whether as a teenager already demonstrating his formidable people skills, or as an immensely old man, still the same mix of charm, empathy, self-pity and tantrums; Baruth even gets mischievous fun out of a confrontation between Sal and a programmed BC at an interactive mock-up of a White House Coffee.
It’s a shame that Baruth’s real strength as a character-driven storyteller is too often eclipsed by arid think-tank scenarios.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80294-1
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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