Impressive and worthwhile, but even committed readers will be tempted to skim at times.
Final entry in the alternate-world Northland trilogy (Bronze Summer, 2012, etc.).
Once again, stunning worldbuilding is the order of the day. In 1315, Extelur, originally built thousands of years ago as a wall to hold back the encroaching seas, has expanded into a vast linear city housing the most powerful civilization in the world. To the east lies the Hattusan (Hittite) Empire; to the south, Carthage, having destroyed Rome in the Punic Wars, occupies North Africa and Iberia; the Mongols hold sway in Asia; in the Americas, three sprawling civilizations have arisen. As the story opens, old scholar Pyxeas studies the behavior of glaciers in Coldland (Greenland). He returns to Extelur with a young Inuit companion, Avatak, and bad news: The current bitterly cold weather is but a harbinger of a new Ice Age. But Pyxeas’ understanding of the forces and processes behind this is yet incomplete, so he plans to travel to Cathay to consult the scholars there, meanwhile warning Extelur’s fractious leaders of what is to come. Few, of course, believe him—until another heatless summer is rapidly followed by a winter of unprecedented ferocity. As Pyxeas and Avatak make their way to Cathay, they observe civilizations in the throes of collapse. The Hattusans, menaced by Scand and Rus hordes fleeing the north, make a fateful decision: uproot their entire empire and sail south to challenge Carthage for control of the agricultural wealth of Egypt. All this is brought to vibrant life in a series of fine character studies and interactions, even if the plotting is far less probable than the densely woven backdrop. The drawback is Baxter’s tendency to drench everything in detail, all too frequently slowing the narrative to a crawl.
Impressive and worthwhile, but even committed readers will be tempted to skim at times.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-24012-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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