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
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.
This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery.
Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition...and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. Unsure of how to mix with the necromancers and cavaliers from the other Houses, Gideon must decide whom among them she can trust—and her doubts include her own necromancer, Harrow, whom she’s loathed since childhood. This intriguing genre stew works surprisingly well. The limited locations and narrow focus mean that the author doesn’t really have to explain how people not directly attached to a necromantic House or the military actually conduct daily life in the Empire; hopefully future installments will open up the author’s creative universe a bit more. The most interesting aspect of the novel turns out to be the prickly but intimate relationship between Gideon and Harrow, bound together by what appears at first to be simple hatred. But the challenges of Canaan House expose other layers, beginning with a peculiar but compelling mutual loyalty and continuing on to other, more complex feelings, ties, and shared fraught experiences.
Suspenseful and snarky with surprising emotional depths.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31319-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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