A somewhat wooden science-fiction thriller that drifts into existential—even mystical—territory.
Moskovitz concludes his science-fiction trilogy with this novel about the secret origin—and potential future—of humanity.
Advances in science have done away with the need for religion—at least until evidence of intelligent design is discovered encoded into people’s DNA. The Church of the Double Helix rises as a new religious force, its worship built around musical translations of messages in the DNA code—messages from beings in a parallel universe detailing the creation of humanity. Fifteen-year-old prodigy Natasha Takana attends its services every Sunday, attempting to decipher the incomplete message. “A dying civilization in a parallel world, facing annihilation, had reached across the boundary between worlds to preserve its legacy. What, Natasha wondered, were the events that had driven them nearly to extinction?” Had anyone from that world survived? Natasha manages to ride the music into that parallel dimension, where the Creators themselves offer her a warning for the future. Elsewhere, journalist Lena Holbrook is investigating a remote back-to-basics commune in Oregon. She is particularly interested in a couple who live there with their preternaturally gifted daughter, Macklyn. Meanwhile, a small group of genetically engineered immortals known as Lazarus plot to gain control of Natasha or Macklyn, or both, and thereby breed a new generation of superhumans. Moskovitz’s prose is reliably lean and exact: “Abraham began his rounds just after daybreak. After the previous day’s squall and a light rain during the night, the sand underfoot was damp and dense and the fruit on the trees glistened.” The novel draws together the storylines of previous books in the Brink of Life trilogy in a way that is thematically coherent, if not exactly emotionally satisfying. The characters here are stiffer than in past works, and the narrative feels a bit less organic. Moskovitz, who also wrote The Brink of Life (2019), asks questions that are ambitious and vast—about the nature of humanity, the origin of life, the future of the planet—and the novel is short enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The book makes its landing without coming apart, but it does so without the panache fans of the previous volumes have likely hoped for.
A somewhat wooden science-fiction thriller that drifts into existential—even mystical—territory.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73417-892-0
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Fluke Tale Productions
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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