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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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