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
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
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