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Odysseus: Bound

Name: Odysseus: Bound
Author: Stephen Logsdon
ISBN: 978-0986140211

by Stephen Logsdon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 2015

Initially promising sci-fi laid low by dull stretches and an unsatisfying ending.

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In Logsdon’s sci-fi debut, the last surviving member of a deep-space research crew attempts to find signs of life in the universe.

Lt. Barrett Hannum is the navigator of the United World Space ship the Odysseus, a research vessel whose crew explores the galaxy in search of potential mineral caches, planetary colonization candidates, and, above all else, intelligent life. When a massive derelict spacecraft is found orbiting a backwater planet, the headstrong commander of the Odysseus—who desperately wants to be the first human to find intelligent life—ignores safety precautions and decides to attempt to board the giant craft, which is approximately 71 kilometers long. As Hannum readies himself to board the obviously alien ship, something attacks the Odysseus and Hannum loses consciousness. When he awakes, he is the only crew member left alive on the ship, which has been inexplicably relocated deep inside a cavern. The chamber contains hundreds of alien spacecraft, which have been presumably procured in the same way as Odysseus. With hundreds of robotic “crawlers” swarming over and through the ship, Hannum—with help from the ship’s main artificial intelligence, Aeon, must survive long enough to unravel the mystery surrounding the orbiting derelict and the massive collection of ships. The novel’s first half is fascinating and fast-paced, and the prose is well-written throughout. Once Hannum reaches relative safety, however, the action fizzles. His attempts to communicate with another imprisoned alien ship and to locate potential surviving members of his crew are interesting, but the slow pacing—coupled with the long periods of inactivity from Hannum (he explores virtually through cloaked pods)—drain the novel’s energy.

Initially promising sci-fi laid low by dull stretches and an unsatisfying ending.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2015

ISBN: 978-0986140211

Page Count: 300

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.