An odd but thematically profound and engrossing cli-fi tale.
This fusion of eco-thriller, New Age–powered speculative fiction, brutal social commentary, and comedic SF à la Douglas Adams offers sagacious solutions to the present-day climate crisis.
Loosely based on the Starseed lore from the works of Margaret Doner, Horowitz’s debut novel begins in the near future with Earth on the brink of a mass extinction event. Not only are climate disasters ravaging the planet (flooding, heat waves, forest fires), but infectious diseases like West Nile, Lyme disease, and even the black plague are on the rise. And because of the increasing prevalence of industrial pollutants in the air and water, humankind is indeed “getting dumber by the minute.” The planet’s only hope for salvation comes in the form of the Arcturians, benevolent aliens who want to rid Earth of an infestation of malevolent invaders (known as Reptilians) who want to enslave the planet, just like they have countless other star systems. The Arcturians are further motivated because many of their spiritual brothers and sisters (known as Starseeds) have been secretly living on Earth and are in peril as well. In an effort to gather the myriad Reptilian villains together in one place and eradicate them, the Arcturian brain trust comes up with a plan with a group of elite scientists and military brass. They’re going to hold a party that is bigger than Woodstock, a bash that is like “Disney World on acid.” They even have a Rolling Stones cover band: “A Mick Jagger lookalike played Sympathy for the Devil. He was ninety-two years old and rocking the stage with his tongue hanging out of his mouth—except it wasn’t on purpose. He was, of course, performing with a Keith Richards clone, who looked no different than Richards had in any decade.”
While humor is arguably one of the biggest challenges to do well as a writer, Horowitz largely holds his own, particularly with Mel Brooks–ian comedy involving explosive farts, anal probes, and military missions like “Operation Pickle Tickle.” But some of the humor does miss the mark, and the satirical tone often contradicts the solemnity of the subject matter. That said, the impact of the Arcturians’ message—as well as their common-sense solutions—is more than enough to fuel this series opener. Part 4, in particular, is revelatory—filled with countless ideas to ignite and inspire change, from a full transition to electric cars to renewable wind-water-solar energy to a worldwide tree-planting campaign. The author, a renowned expert on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, spells out the chilling consequences if humankind fails in stopping this planetary ecocide: “Without coordinated action and cooperation among countries, those few who survived would do so without any significant quality of life. We’d all fall like dominos.” The sheer uniqueness of this storyline—which includes references to Area 51, Atlantis, Star Trek, vampires, zombies, angels, astrological birth charts, alien absinthe, and seven-breasted women—is a strength as well as a weakness. Finding the target audience for this highly unusual story could be difficult. A strange little gem of a tale or an allegorical how-to guide on how to save the planet? Only time will tell.
An odd but thematically profound and engrossing cli-fi tale.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-169-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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