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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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