A solidly entertaining and sometimes enthralling interplanetary yarn.
In Bruno’s debut SF series starter, refugees of a cyborg invasion colonize a distant, exotic world only to find bizarre and terrifying new threats.
In the future, humans on Earth have had to contend with an uprising of cyborgs called the Undriel, who are reminiscent of the Borg of the Star Trek universe. Human survivors in a war spanning the solar system wind up making a final stand on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. The Undriel overwhelm them, but young mechanic Denton Castus and his family manage to flee just in time by joining tens of thousands of humans in stasis as part of a desperate plan called the Telemachus Project. They take a 300-year flight to a habitable planet called Kamaria, which is “Earth-like, but different from Earth in a lot of ways.” For example, the exotic and potentially dangerous life-forms, from airborne bacteria to a race of technologically advanced, psychic flying humanoids called the Auk’nai, are very different, indeed. In a flashback, a previous Telemachus Project ship lands on Kamaria and its passengers make a tentative accord with the Auk’nai and explore the immediate vicinity, which includes a forbidding, abandoned city. There, a malevolent influence possesses war hero Roelin Raike. The two story threads come together when Denton awakens on Kamaria and integrates into the colonists’ society, where a long-ago incomprehensible crime is a lingering trauma. Before long, Denton also begins to feel the same psychic presence that afflicted Raike. Bruno is a highly imaginative and natural storyteller, conjuring numerous technologies, cultures, and creatures and providing a particularly spectacular ending. SF fans may detect echoes of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, TV’s Babylon Five, the blockbuster film Avatar, and other works; the smoothly polished prose and snappy pace are reminiscent of a no-nonsense master thriller author such as Alistair Maclean. The technology and biology descriptions don’t get in the way of the suspense, and the references to ancient Greek legend sharpen the backstory of Kamaria’s godlike aliens, who do indeed seem mythic. Hall’s illustrations feel like a tribute to the material’s stated origin—a comic book that Bruno created in elementary school.
A solidly entertaining and sometimes enthralling interplanetary yarn.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73464-701-3
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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