Inventive and compulsively readable sci-fi.
A parallel dimension holds the secret to an audacious project that allows people from the past to live in the present.
In the middle of the desert, Sam Ahearn of Ahearn Industries enters a nondescript warehouse to check out a portal there. Known as the Hole, it is the entry to another dimension. Sam enters the portal with his head of security, Oscar Larsen. A simple evaluation soon goes wrong when the portal door never reopens. In Bainbridge, New Hampshire, Carrie Heath awaits the arrival of distant relatives John and Sally Dearborn and their daughter, Meg. The Dearborns are no ordinary family; they lived and died in the 1800s and were brought back to life by Ahearn Industries thanks to an organism found within the alternate dimension. The Dearborns and others like them are called retreads (which of course refers to secondhand tires that receive new treads). While the Dearborns adjust to their new lives in contemporary society, Sam and Oscar struggle to stay alive within the Hole. When they meet Micajer “Cager” Barclay, a young man with a connection to Meg, they discover there may be another portal out of the Hole. But the key to their escape may rest with Meg. The latest from Hobbs (New Hope, 2014, etc.) is an irresistible sci-fi yarn with a provocative premise, strong characters, and fast-paced action. The concepts developed throughout the novel allow the author to explore questions of identity and the ethics of Ahearn’s enterprise. The chapters alternate between Sam’s and Oscar’s travails in the Hole and the Dearborn family’s encounters in Bainbridge, with excerpts from Margaret Dearborn’s diary serving as a bridge to connect the narratives. The structure is effective and offers a glimpse into the experiences of retreads from multiple perspectives. Hobbs introduces a large number of characters over the course of the tale and all are well-developed, especially Margaret, who decides to change her first name to Meg to reflect her new life as a retread. The action sequences within the Hole are gripping as Sam and Oscar confront a mysterious and dangerous world.
Inventive and compulsively readable sci-fi.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9993177-0-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hatchet Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
