Small print, big picture. Pavlou’s masterpiece doesn’t let us off easy.
Spellbinding mainstream science-fiction spectacular.
The London-based Pavlou’s polymath debut wears five years of research in several disciplines. It turns on sunspots and a casting off of the sun’s coronal shield every 12,000 years, which causes vast devastation here. In 2012, new gravitational centers are found under Antarctica, the Arctic, the Amazon, Cairo, and Wupu, in China, pointing to an electromagnetic buildup that may combine with gravity waves hurtling from the sun—or defend us from them. Discovered at the same time is C60, a manmade form of carbon fabulously harder than diamond. American oil riggers for Rola Corp. in Antarctica have broken through an undersea wall that clearly belongs to a sunken city, one corresponding to Atlantis. Crystallized chunks of C60 come up the pipe and bear pre-cuneiform lettering: language older than the oldest known Sumerian cuneiform, almost certainly from a lost civilization. But how could there be a whole wall of C60 when the entire amount of C60 made by man amounts to a very expensive pinhead? Lost civilizations other than Atlantis, including the Zoroastrian and Aztec, loom large in Pavlou. After discoveries in Wupu, the Chinese are as interested in C60 as the Americans are, and war hovers over the massive undersea store in Antarctica. We follow Rola Corp. teams of scientists at three of the gravity spots and visit the three-mile-long CERN atom smasher outside Geneva, where a piece of the crystal is bombarded and analyzed. Meanwhile, Dr. Richard Scott, a linguist/cultural anthropologist/epigraphist who spends years deciphering ancient inscriptions, is brought in to decipher the Atlantis lettering, and we are treated to long discourses on world languages. Also on hand is Dr. Jon Hackett, a specialist in complexity theory, who gives us complexity workouts. The female leads: Scott’s 19-year-old assistant, November Dryden, and tough-talking geologist Sarah Kelsey, who discovers immense tunnels and other marvels under the Sphinx and Great Pyramid.
Small print, big picture. Pavlou’s masterpiece doesn’t let us off easy.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28075-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and...
This future space fantasy might start an underground craze.
It feeds on the shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Martian series), Aeschylus, Christ and J.R. Tolkien. The novel has a closed system of internal cross-references, and features a glossary, maps and appendices dealing with future religions and ecology. Dune itself is a desert planet where a certain spice liquor is mined in the sands; the spice is a supremely addictive narcotic and control of its distribution means control of the universe. This at a future time when the human race has reached a point of intellectual stagnation. What is needed is a Messiah. That's our hero, called variously Paul, then Muad'Dib (the One Who Points the Way), then Kwisatz Haderach (the space-time Messiah). Paul, who is a member of the House of Atreides (!), suddenly blooms in his middle teens with an ability to read the future and the reader too will be fascinated with the outcome of this projection.
With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and it should interest advanced sci-fi devotees.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1965
ISBN: 0441013597
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Chilton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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