An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.
In Cohen’s SF series installment, a New Jersey widower, who’s partnered with a powerful talking spaceship to protect Earth, faces major life changes that include an alien invasion.
This series began with Saabrina (2015), and it offers a straight-faced approach to a way-out premise: Bob Foxen, a middle-aged Everyman, has taken a sharp turn in his life by becoming a “Sentinel”; he’s charged with secretly guarding the security of an unsuspecting planet Earth and other worlds under the aegis of the mighty United Star System, or USS. Bob tackles this task with his extraordinary artificial intelligence partner, Saabrina—a transdimensional robotic spaceship that looks like a sporty but modest Saab automobile but can defeat an entire space fleet. Saabrina can also create a humanlike holographic projection of herself in various guises and has access to a vast knowledge base. Eight years into their partnership, the duo have survived perils and assignments on Earth and on other USS protectorates. Now Bob’s daughter, Rebecca, is about to get married to a man who has a high command post in the USS, and Saabrina is happily taking part in preparations. Soon, however, a crisis arises involving a powerful group of car-shaped alien robots called Firebirds that resemble the familiar Pontiac vehicles of the same name. When the avaricious Empire of the Greater Noble Houses moves to conquer a disputed border planet, Bob and Saabrina undertake its defense, but the heroes are blindsided by a hostile Firebird on the enemy side. Saabrina is seriously wounded, and Bob requires emergency USS medical treatment. Even if they recuperate, how can they defeat such a formidable foe? And what about Rebecca’s big wedding ceremony?
Cohen’s offbeat narrative is seriocomic (or perhaps serio-cosmic) in tone, alternating between upper-middle-class domestic dramedy and surprisingly sparse space-battle intrigues. A lengthy and vitally important aside may broadside the reader in the middle act, in which a traumatized, offline Saabrina dreams vividly of a human life in surreal, 1980s-ish “Neo York” as a graduate student at Columbia University, trying to defend her dissertation on graphic novels amid a whirl of dates, vampires, werewolves, and anime clichés. AIs aren’t even supposed to be able to dream of electric sheep, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, let alone attend a magic college, so readers may wonder just what’s going on; a few other key points remain unresolved in this installment as well. Other than the car-robots, the novel’s alien characters often feel like escapees from a low-budget SF TV show, including Graustarkian counts and European-type decadent royals. Other pop-culture ingredients and shoutouts reference the comic strip “Peanuts,” the graphic novel Maus, Arthur C. Clarke, Doctor Who, Russian literature, columnist Russell Baker, and Star Trek: “She looks again, farther out, letting the stars stream by. She hears Kirk speak the words: ‘Space, the final frontier.’ She has lived them.” Even with the unanswered questions, this entry remains a comfortable ride for genre fans who’ve settled into the bucket seats of Cohen’s peculiar universe.
An auto-centric spacefaring franchise motors on with its curious sense of humor intact.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 9780998976433
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Pengriffin Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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