Light-year-leaping space-opera fun, pure and simple.
In Bruno’s SF tale of a future dominated by a for-profit system of teleportation portals, a scrounger stumbles upon outlaw technology that could change everything.
Space travel in the wild, wild future is conducted via the “Voyalten Web,” faster-than-light spaceship portals used by numerous civilized worlds who participate in an intergalactic socio-economic trading system. The resulting trans-species “Lodespace” has spawned a syndicate of ruthless, paramilitary thugs, controlled by the alien kingpin Gulna Kii Fessenog and his Fleet. The human Levort Aatra occupies the lowest social rung of Lodespace. He’s a “prospector,” scrounging for salvage on the abandoned planet Tayoxe (“The mask of desperation wore heavily on the prospectors who had taken multiple trips down to Tayoxe and found nothing. There were more of these cases on every trip”). Levort’s one advantage is a lifelong friendship with fellow human Bayfo Niall, an armed “enforcer” who uphold the Fleet’s self-serving regulations at ground level. An unfamiliar, four-armed alien informs Levort that a collective of civilizations has generated an alternative to the Voyalten Web: portable devices that generate their own teleportation gates outside of Fessenog’s control and tariffs. Proponents of this taboo network are known as the Beyond, and Fleet policy is to eradicate any trace of them. Bayfo, indoctrinated in Fleet dogma, believes that the Beyond are a “cult” devoted to anarchy and war; Levort’s involvement with them marks him as an enemy, and the conflict between the two former best friends is joined by a variety of creatures on both sides of the fight. The author constructs a gallery of exotic aliens (even if most of them talk like claim-jumpers in old westerns), depicted in cartoon-like inserts in the chapter headings, saving a lot of descriptive verbiage. The action never flags, and no love interests intrude to slow the thrills (perhaps a bromance does, as the two leads bemoan their fellowship lost to ideology and mistrust). Any gravitas reliably yields to a quick teleport to the next exciting caper.
Light-year-leaping space-opera fun, pure and simple.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 9798987571019
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Tom Bruno Author
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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