Old-fashioned, fast-moving, flag-waving SF pitting a straight-arrow hero against hissing, Earth-coveting baddies.
In Ruesterholz’s SF debut, an alien spy sent to infiltrate Earth revolts and fights against the space tyrant who sent him.
It’s 2029, and tech magnate Robert Wilson has risen to prominence in government and economic circles. But Wilson isn’t the American genius inventor he seems. In fact, he is a humanlike alien named Marcus whose home world was conquered and exploited by the evil League of Planets, under ruthless dictator and warlord Anton Frozos. Marcus joined Frozos’ elite spy corps and came to Earth with a sham identity. As the son of ill-fated rebels who resisted Frozos, Marcus is actually working in secret against the empire. As Robert Wilson, he grew immensely rich from Arbor Ridge, his tech company, and secretly built a planetary defense system. In 2029, when Frozos had scheduled his takeover, Robert Wilson makes a preemptive move, emerging in public to reveal his incredible origin and unmask an international network of League of Planets collaborators and traitors, including the leaders of the U.S. and China. Overthrowing a popular American president (replaced by the female VP) and earning the complete trust of Homo sapiens is the easy part. Now Wilson and his cohorts must face an approaching alien armada. And yes, this is one of those SF yarns deploying the genre cliché that Arbor Ridge galactic-shooter video games are really recruiting tools to clandestinely train squadrons of star-fighter pilots. Ruesterholz’s narrative is akin to those stolidly retro space epics attributed to L. Ron Hubbard that seem to stand with one moon boot in tomorrow and one moon boot firmly in the 1950s, possibly even earlier. He doesn’t bloat the narrative, but when third-act breathless battles pile on, one feels a more epic heft might be warranted here. Other old-school facets: The author salutes the American spirit, God, family, business partners, and the sweet notion that an alien threat could unite Earth of the 2020s in a mighty display of cooperative fellowship. Well, it’s not called science fiction for nothing.
Old-fashioned, fast-moving, flag-waving SF pitting a straight-arrow hero against hissing, Earth-coveting baddies.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293928-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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