An entertaining, YA-leaning SF nail-biter.
A teenager on a small, pioneering Mars colony faces the arrival of an additional colony ship and a deadly infestation by lethal Martian insects in Wolff’s SF novel.
The Hellas Station is a trailblazing Mars colony staffed by only a handful of international, highly competent astronauts. One of these exceptional colonists is extra-special: Adam Flynn is the first human born on Mars (sadly, his mother died from cancer in the radiation-rich environment). Seventeen-year-old Adam has matured to be a survival-hardened and resourceful youth who has helped to ready Hellas Station for an influx of nearly 100 new settlers, all of whom are on a long, one-way trip and expect to spend the rest of their lives on the red planet. But Adam is emotionally unprepared for the arrival of the group, which includes 25 more young people, many of them genius-level high-achievers. They all know Adam’s story (unbeknownst to him, the first “Martian” boy is a celebrity figure on Earth) and treat him with a blend of curiosity and disdain. The military commander of the newcomers, Col. Griggs, is a glory-seeking, aggressive type (with two not-so-nice teenagers of his own) who usurps the authority of the established colonists and is particularly condescending to Adam, insisting he is just a “kid” and ignoring hisadvice on all matters Martian. Things begin to go badly: Adam notices an especially powerful dust storm bearing down on the complex, and the installation’s power failures are traced to a frightening infestation by a hitherto-unsuspected Martian life form. At first appearing as dark patches or tiny larvae, the marauders turn out to be countless beetlelike insects. Of course, Col. Griggs and his Earth allies vainly perceive the discovery of life on another planet as an opportunity for naming rights, and as a new potential food source. Adam, on the other hand, figures out quickly that it is the humans who are on the menu.
The first-person-narrated story begins on a note recalling Andy Weir’s popular novel The Martian (2011), sharing an emphasis on the hard science of exoplanet survival skills and making the most of limited resources, with the added YA-friendly perspective of a teen hero with a (very) circumscribed upbringing abruptly coming to terms with having other humans around who are his own age, particularly of the macho-jock and mean-girl sort. (Whatever raging-hormones youthful romance happens here is dialed considerably down.) At around the midway point, with the onslaught of the bug menace, things take a more Hollywood action-movie turn, which is ironic considering how frequently the youthful characters reference celluloid SF (especially 1986’s Aliens) and deny that their plight resembles hack scriptwriting: “If this were a movie, I’d grin triumphantly and say something clever. She’d laugh and give me a fist-bump. Except my life doesn’t seem to be shaping into that kind of movie.” Actually, that really is more or less what transpires, with Adam and select others doing superheroic acts in an oxygen-starved atmosphere and facing off against unimaginable hordes with the most meagre homebrew weaponry while tossing off courageous asides. There is gruesome gore and a shocking body count, underlying the message that haughty grown-ups should give more credence to precocious astro-kids, especially when it comes to monsters.
An entertaining, YA-leaning SF nail-biter.Pub Date: April 27, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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