An interstellar adventure that struggles to make it off the launching pad.
A mysterious deep space message emanating from Alpha Centauri sparks the creation of special NASA team charged with tracking down the signal.
In 2222, scientists have everything they need for humanity’s first-ever rendezvous with a bona fide extraterrestrial: Hysperion, a snazzy new spaceship with an indestructible hull; crafty gizmos built for a variety of intergalactic contingencies; and a gung ho crew that doesn’t ask a lot questions about the insanely dangerous two-year mission they’re about to undertake. Pondering the nature of the aliens she’s about to encounter seems to be the last thing on Michelle Roderick’s mind. Instead, as the indistinguishable group’s nondescript leader, she’s got man trouble at home and an interfering mother to deal with. Her old flame, John, has crept back into the picture after jilting her seven years prior, swearing this time that he really does love her and wants to marry her. On top of that, the commander of this momentous expedition to the stars has even more pressing matters to attend to—like arranging dinner with his folks. The harried commander’s crew, meanwhile, is a bickering mob of featureless personalities. The astronauts don’t care for the two military types thrown into the mix, so they spend most of their preflight preparations snapping and sniping at each other, even though interchangeable dialogue makes the conversations difficult to track. The underwritten narrative eventually travels into outer space, where a planned pit stop to collect some high-grade methane on one of Saturn’s moons becomes predictably problematic. But once there, events inexplicably shift into warp drive. First contact is raced through so rapidly that it comes off as merely a cursory event. Before the star dust can settle, casualties are neatly sliced, diced and digested in preparation for the undeveloped conclusion. Still, the author’s enthusiasm for his subjects is oddly compelling and some of the fanciful notions about creepy aliens and wacky gadgets are fun to imagine.
An interstellar adventure that struggles to make it off the launching pad.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984397112
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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