The inimitable Lem continues his penetrating, profound social criticism by dramatizing—in the form of an alien-contact yarn—what can go wrong with society even when ideology is absent. A ship of six human explorers, identified only by their specialties, crash-lands on planet Eden. Odd enough is the local vegetation: tangles of spiderlike vines; giant calyxes that withdraw into the ground; blossoms that take flight like startled insects. Odder still are Eden's huge, leaping inhabitants, or "doublers," whose humped bodies support subsidiary centaurlike torsos, arms, and heads. As the Engineer, the Cyberneticist, and the Physicist labor to rebuild the ship's wrecked systems, the Captain, the Doctor, and the Chemist explore an automated factory, manufacturing who-knows-what, that appears abandoned and out of control. Further afield, they observe strange alien vehicles, mass graves, weird buildings full of skeletons in jars, pits containing deformed corpses, microminiature clockwork "seeds" the "grow" walls of glass. As violence inevitably erupts, the crew members are forced to defend themselves—but only when an alien astronomer detects do the humans learn that they are witnessing a biological experiment gone wrong, perpetrated by a government so secretive that it denies its own existence. Like Lem's most recent, the brilliant Fiasco (1987), a terrifyingly plausible picture of a world gone mad.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1989
ISBN: 0156278065
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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 new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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