Solid, combat-ready speculative fiction with retro-feeling foes and battlegrounds.
In Manning and Rosone’s military–SF series starter set in the year 2093, three very different military recruits experience baptism by fire in a savage human-alien war on a distant world.
On late-21st-century Earth, in the Republic—a global coalition including the former United States of America—three young men decide to embark on off-world armed-forces careers. Harrison Kodiak is a burly youth with a college football scholarship and a social-climbing girlfriend who impulsively joins up when a recruiter impresses him about seeing the galaxy; Aiden Hall, a Chicago criminal arrested after an attempted robbery turned fatal, accepts soldiering as an alternative to prison; and Oliver Moore, a U.K. citizen connected to royalty, gives up his birthright to become a combat medic. The trio bond during basic training in the shadow of a looming war against other spacegoing Earth nations. However, a new threat emerges after alien contact on New Eden, an Earth-like, largely unspoiled world 12 light-years away. Like the Tharks in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ old Mars stories, the Zodarks are fearless, multiarmed, fanged giants who savor ground battles with swords, though they wield plasma artillery, grenades, and mobile platforms as well. They immediately clash with humans, and there are indications that an invasion of Earth will be on their agenda. Kodiak, Moore, and Hall are among the first reinforcement troops to arrive at New Eden for the fight. Manning and Rosone’s new series takes place in the same fictional universe as their earlier Rise of the Republic saga. This introductory installment is a lively space-traveling military-service drama that benefits from strong characterizations and robust action. The overall plot, however, feels fairly standard-issue, and the alien bad guys lack depth; they’re generic, bestial enslavers that call to mind the bosses in a video game. Descriptions of hardware and ordnance, though, derive fairly well from currently existing real-life technology. The book’s overarching themes are comradeship, duty, discipline, honor, and courage, and it comes as no surprise when the co-authors pay tribute to real-world veterans in their afterwords.
Solid, combat-ready speculative fiction with retro-feeling foes and battlegrounds. (science fiction)Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-957634-31-9
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Front Line Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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