An inventive, entertaining sci-fi tale involving valuable alien secrets.
In this debut novel, humanity colonizes space with the aid of an alien StarDrive found on Mars, left there millennia ago by an extinct race known as the Galactics.
In the distant future, earthlings have established themselves on many worlds, but always with a sharp and often dangerous divide between the superwealthy haves and the very poor have-nots. Humans could take even greater strides, but they cannot translate the lost language of the Galactics and learn their ancient secrets. Into this world is born the tough and clever Tony Palermo, who had risen from a sad and difficult youth to a career as an agent in the colonies on the moon and then fallen through a dismal job on a trading ship down into a lethal dilemma. Tony is caught stealing from the rich and powerful Illyan Espinosa, who offers him just one chance to save himself from certain death: steal the secret of translating the Galactic language from the scientist who may have cracked it with a file called Rosetta. Tony naturally agrees, and so begins a desperate adventure in which he struggles against the many forces that also want the key to Galactic. Along the way, he opts to rescue a secretly brilliant slave, Aja, who is forced to dig for alien artifacts and owns a “pet” angel, a mathematical genius. Things really heat up as Tony learns that the artificial intelligence duplicate of a metahuman revolutionary he once killed has reactivated, with all the human worlds ripe for chaos. Patterson’s characters are strong and well-delineated. The book’s pacing is fast despite dense worldbuilding that requires the reader to pay careful attention to many details (“With space travel, you needed an immensely powerful Gravitic Torus and a multi gigawatt nuclear reactor just to get started. You also needed a way of shedding all the waste heat the nuclear reactor created. So you also needed a huge radiator—bigger than a football field”). Dialogue is engaging and colorful, while action is frequent and well-described. The text is clean and clear despite the occasional minor typo (for example, “angle” instead of angel). Although most genre tales are now left open to sequels as a matter of course, in this case, it is a welcome choice.
An inventive, entertaining sci-fi tale involving valuable alien secrets.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Literology Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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