An uncomplicated but well-rendered exploration of a familiar body-switch premise.
Aliens offer an average guy in Oregon a way to avoid death by transferring his consciousness to a female body in Denton’s debut SF novel.
Scott Michael Evers was raised by an alcoholic father and became a loutish, single, saloon-centered adult, prone to settling conflicts with his fists. He has one extraordinary distinction, though: As a boy, he was abducted by aliens—the big-eyed, inquisitive Sroans, whose saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947. Off-world,they monitor Scott remotely via implants. When Scott develops stage 4 cancer and stoically prepares to die in 2005, his extraterrestrial guardian angels reveal themselves with an urgent offer. A despondent Ukrainian woman whom the Sroan were studying has just shot herself in the head, and the aliens have the ability, via superscience, to transfer Scott’s mind to her body, enabling him to live and remain in close proximity to his small extended family; his best pal, Dan; and the few others he cares about. He accepts the Sroans’ offer, but as Jody, she encounters difficulty when she tries to convince skeptics that she’s been remade. She also has trouble adapting to her new situation; for one thing, men now treat her as a sex object—just as Scott used to do when he inhabited a male body. Meanwhile, government and military operatives notice the alien meddling and decide to take action. The body-switch gimmick was a standby in comedy literature even before it became a Hollywood rom-com plot. Here, Denton straightforwardly explores this setup in an SF context using the same sort of relatable, plainspoken language that genre maestro Richard Matheson employed for the plight of his protagonist in the 1956 novel The Shrinking Man. Denton doesn’t dazzle with wordplay, but he manages to eschew absurd jokiness. Along the way, he shows a generosity of spirit to the various characters, even the putative bad guys. That said, some readers may be disappointed the novel doesn’t delve more deeply into feminist themes and questions of identity and transgender politics, as SF virtuosos have done with similar material.
An uncomplicated but well-rendered exploration of a familiar body-switch premise.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An epic space adventure.
A thief and a teleporter team up to save their former crew in the finale of Mihalik's Starlight's Shadow trilogy.
Lexi Bowen is one of the most accomplished recovery specialists—code for thief—in the galaxy. She's nervous about taking a contract that requires her to return to Valovia, home planet of the ruthless enemies she once fought as a soldier, but the payout is too enticing to decline. Once she arrives on Valovia, she is almost immediately cornered by the Empress Nepru’s private guards. Teleporter Nilo Shoren appears in the middle of the altercation and teleports her to safety. Lexi’s history with Nilo is complicated. They were both crew members on Starlight’s Shadow, but Lexi has never forgiven Nilo for luring her to what she thought was a date only for him to steal a job right out from under her. She can’t understand why Nilo would save her now, and she’s determined to escape Valovia on her own. Nilo convinces her to accept his help escaping the empress, but their plans change when they discover Starlight’s Shadow and its crew are missing. Lexi and Nilo suspect that their friends were heading for the planet Rodeni, trying to capture a fugitive, and they set a course to mount a rescue mission. Lexi is a likable, tough-as-nails character determined to make it on her own. The truth is that she suffers flashbacks and panic attacks from the war, and she is afraid to show her vulnerabilities to Nilo. Although she tries to convince herself that her attraction to Nilo isn’t serious, she finds it impossible to resist him. In order to be together, they must learn to trust and openly communicate with each other, whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom.
An epic space adventure.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780063051102
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Punchy, plausible, and bittersweet; studded with zingers until the very last line.
The desperate logistics of planning for the apocalypse reach their climax in the conclusion to a space opera trilogy that began with The Collapsing Empire (2017) and The Consuming Fire (2018).
Time is running out for Cardenia Wu-Patrick, aka Grayland II, emperox of the planet-spanning Interdependency. As she struggles to come up with a plan to save the billions who will suffer and starve in the wake of the collapse of the Flow, the extradimensional network connecting the planets of her far-flung empire, her nemesis, Lady Nadashe Nohamapetan, continues to scheme against her. With the support of many of the noble houses—who plan to abandon their subjects while preserving themselves and their wealth in a flight to End, the only self-sufficient planet in the Interdependency—Nadashe now seeks the throne for herself. Meanwhile, Cardenia’s lover, the Flow physicist Lord Marce Claremont, attempts to devise a scientific solution to the Flow collapse, unaware that Cardenia is hiding vital data from him. And the clever but hot-tempered Lady Kiva Lagos attempts to spy on Nadashe in hopes of defusing the coup, but she may have gotten herself in too deep this time. Scalzi treads a delicate line here: He set out to chart an apocalypse, and a deus ex machina would be cheating. The book also serves as an acknowledgment that intelligence and good intentions are not an impregnable armor against venality and the pitiless laws of physics. (In addition to slowing down Scalzi's writing—something he acknowledges in an afterword—the current sociopolitical situation in the U.S. has clearly flavored the story.) Given those parameters, Scalzi plays fair while still offering his readers some hope. And even when depicting the direst situations, Scalzi’s work retains its snarky cheer.
Punchy, plausible, and bittersweet; studded with zingers until the very last line.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8916-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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