Human-alien close encounters are just a teaser for an engaging, philosophical SF comedy.
A physically ideal alien from the planet Mund finds sex, intellectual arguments, and more sex when she seeks inspiration to save her moribund home world via a brash, saloon-going human.
Dubbed “Adult Science Fiction” by debut author Hunter, this satire begins on Mund, where all-knowing science, medicine, and technology have created an approximation of paradise. But beautiful, ageless Stella (one of 50 or so stupefying face-and-body types available) is concerned that her perfected race, long reliant on machines and software to do its bidding, faces extinction due to infertile DNA and selfish apathy. She is besotted with Earth for its low culture, high energy, and creativity—Abbott and Costello sketches, TV sitcoms, puerile obsessions with lust, wealth, power, and revenge—and believes that though Homo sapiens rank dismally in the Federation of United Planets Report on Developing Worlds, an infusion of human mojo is what Mund needs. She journeys to Earth, armed only with her mental powers and incredible erotic allure, and seeks recruits at a saloon and pool hall called The Golden Rack. Her best prospect: John, aka “John the Great,” a “communist” (claiming that he believes in genuine, idealistic communism, not degraded forms that spawn Marxist police states) and swaggering rogue who mixes womanizing with semivindictive intellectual debates. John disbelieves Stella’s alien tale, but he wants to learn if her brains and breasts are equally spellbinding. Thus, he treats her to an idyll at a lodge. The bedroom gymnastics, for readers expecting 50 Shades of Galaxies, are all cheeky euphemisms and metaphors rather than clinically described. More often, the characters’ dialogue involves politics, religion, American unexceptionalism, and the meaning of life. The slight storyline is driven by whether the coupling couple will stay earthbound, part ways, or fly into the cosmos together. The writer’s iconoclastic tone is frequently a clever one, and it is all playful, guys’ fantasy stuff with a mild social-conscience agenda, like the material that Kurt Vonnegut or (maybe) Harlan Ellison would do for Playboy subscribers in the olden days. Actually, Hugh Hefner’s more hardcore newsstand rival Hustler has a cameo instead. But if it weren’t for the strong expletives, this short novel would bear a PG-13 rating akin to the latest shag-a-delic Austin Powers movie.
Human-alien close encounters are just a teaser for an engaging, philosophical SF comedy.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-8462908903
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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