Action-jammed, entertaining, and sometimes profound pseudo-history SF despite the pulpy plotting.
In this SF novel, an alien mothership blunders into a historic Soviet space flight, triggering conflicts and mayhem between Russia, America, and the extraterrestrials.
SF authors Bruno and Castle recast the 1960s Cold War with an alien encounter of the unfortunate kind rather than Cubans. A vast mothership carrying an amphibious race (the Vulbathi) materializes in 1961, by chance—or perhaps God’s design; a few Roman Catholic characters ponder this—in the path of Yuri Gagarin’s manned space flight, killing the pioneer cosmonaut. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, assuming American aggression, launches his nuclear arsenal, which the advanced Vulbathi divert but don’t exactly neutralize. A belt of Eastern European countries becomes the “Dead Curtain,” irradiated and strewn with alien refuse and weird aftereffects (shades of Arkady and Boris Strugetsky’s first-contact classic, Roadside Picnic). Three years later, the Vulbathi—known in human slang as “Toads”—sojourn on the moon in an uneasy détente with Soviet, American, and Chinese officials, who covet their superscience and maintain peaceful relations despite the traumatic history and the black market in copied Toad gadgets and arms. Kyle McCoy was a foot soldier in the early Dead Curtain American-Russian-Vulbathi skirmishes who miraculously negotiated a cease-fire. Now, he is prominent in the DAR—not the Daughters of the American Revolution but the Department of Alien Relations. He is invited to an interspecies summit meeting to chart a future. But deadly sabotage, assassination, and terror ensue. Meanwhile, it goes unappreciated that present at the scene is not really Kyle but his ne’er-do-well twin brother, Connor, a junkie, con man, and part-time Hollywood actor, who switched places. Yes, that’s right, and more than one character marvels at this groaning cliché. The authors’ hell-for-leather approach brims with battles, betrayals, and cartoony villains, including a recurring New York City Mafia crime lord (who ultimately gets a more positive evaluation than the statesmen and politicians). President John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Neil Armstrong, and J. Edgar Hoover are among the real-life eminences who show up (seldom in a flattering light), though a sense of nostalgia gets dispelled by the occasional anachronisms in the prose. Still, there are no cellphones or PCs in this diverting roller-coaster ride through what-if time and space.
Action-jammed, entertaining, and sometimes profound pseudo-history SF despite the pulpy plotting.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949890-61-7
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Aethon Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious debut that falls just short of landing among the stars.
Burdened with the knowledge that the world is ending, an indentured servant tries to make the most of what's left of her life.
More than a century ago, humans left Earth on a world-ship bound for Telos. The rich and powerful bought their way aboard, but for the poor, a 200-year contract of generational servitude, which would end only upon arrival at their destination, proved to be the only means of getting off-world. Just before their deaths by suicide, the Carlyles tell 25-year-old Myrra—the third-generation indentured servant whose contract they own—that space will tear the irreparably damaged ship apart decades before it ever reaches Telos. Honoring her owners' final wishes, Myrra takes the Carlyles' infant daughter, Charlotte, and sets out as a fugitive contract-breaker to look for a good place to die. On her trail is Tobias—the police detective son of criminals, desperate to distance himself from his parents' legacy—who begins to feel a strong kinship with the resourceful young woman. Unfortunately, even though the third-person narration moves between their perspectives in alternating chapters, Myrra and Tobias never really come alive. The narrative voice keeps both characters at a distance that prevents readers from making emotional connections with them. Levien's debut makes no secret of the fact that the world is ending, but its shallow character sketches lack the depth necessary to make an audience care what happens to its cast before the final earthquake comes for them.
An ambitious debut that falls just short of landing among the stars.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-59241-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.
A coming-of-age story in which the main character is, literally, out of this world.
In Northeast Philadelphia, in the Earth year 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a woman destined to be a single mother. The baby is too small, and her mother, observing her under the hospital phototherapy lamp, thinks she looks “other than human. Plant or marine life, maybe. An orchid or otter. A shrimp.” One reason for this might be the lamp’s unearthly blue-green light, or the fact that the baby is early and the mother traumatized by her difficult birth. Another might be the fact that Adina is actually otherworldly, an alien life form from a planet 300,000 light-years away, sent to infiltrate human society and “take notes.” This Adina does assiduously all throughout her childhood and adolescence in 1980s and '90s Philadelphia, where she lives with her Earth mother in a poor, ethnically Italian neighborhood that is slowly sinking into the toxic ground on which it was built. The notes themselves—winsome observations on the nature of the creatures that surround her (animal, vegetable, and, most mysteriously, human)—are sent via a fax machine Adina’s Earth mother scavenges from the trash and sets up in her bedroom. Adina’s extraterrestrial superiors return encouragement via interstellar fax and offer occasional instruction through telepathic dreams that take place in their best approximation of what an Earth classroom might look like. As Adina grows and her circle of influence widens to include her tough but loving mother, her iconoclastic friend Toni and Toni’s film-buff brother Dominic, enemies, loves, false friends, and the other characters of a well-rounded Earth existence, Adina becomes more and more aware of how different she feels from her Earthling friends, even as her life follows the pattern of their joys and sorrows. A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary.
A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780374109288
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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