A well-done and satisfying SF thriller with a memorable young antihero.
An adolescent boy in 1967 forms a bond with an extraterrestrial entity stranded on Earth as the local body count rises in Aanes’ SF thriller.
The story opens in an untamed 1663 Virginia forest, where a disc-shaped interstellar craft careens out of control and crashes, entombing its cyclopean alien pilot in a tangle of mud and tree roots. Over the next centuries, the consciousness of the creature attempts to communicate with random humans settling the area, with sometimes fatal results. Ultimately, in the fall of 1967, when the region has become a “redneck” suburban community, the entity finds a collaborator, in the form of adolescent Billy Beaudet. The son of a Korean War casualty on bad terms with his hard-drinking, less-than-loving stepdad, Billy eagerly absorbs the works of Homer and seems more thoughtful and forward-looking than his peers—he won’t subscribe to the prevailing anti-Black racism among his friends, family and neighbors, for instance. The alien inhabits the plastic form of Billy’s favorite toy soldier and reveals itself to Billy as a wonder-working genie, granting Billy’s every whim, including healing the schoolboy’s bad eyesight. But Billy, bright and admirable as he is, remains bound to the testosterone-charged youth culture of cliques, bad-influence peer pressure, merciless feuds, homophobia, and raw lust. Casualties mount in the course of Rémy’s little errands, and the police start to notice. This nicely honed narrative is like something out of a vintage horror comic book crossed with a vivid coming-of-age narrative—Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989) rewritten by Joe R. Lansdale, perhaps, and not for the squeamish. Profane rural dialogue and pithy descriptions (“Bull Broward’s words exploded the levee, their authoritative gravity forcing the human sea to flow along”) lend a fine flavor to the very atypical ET invasion, and Billy is a disturbingly sympathetic menace, as his rash impulses and good intentions bring about shocking and savage acts.
A well-done and satisfying SF thriller with a memorable young antihero.Pub Date: July 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798887030982
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Litprime Solutions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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