An entertaining SF adventure with military and espionage elements.
A U.S. Air Force pilot is tapped to recover an alien spaceship in Hosea’s SF novel.
Captain Ava Tan, trained to extract people from dangerous and volatile environments, is one of the Air Force’s finest pilots. Despite her role as a rescuer and transporter, she regrets not taking the combat-aviator track. When her fiance—one of the other captains in her unit—is killed on a mission, Ava is left bereft and unsure about her future. Then, something truly out of this world happens: An alien spacecraft crash-lands on Earth. Specifically, it crashes in a remote region of North Korea, causing a worldwide panic over what might happen if advanced alien technology falls into the hands of the dictatorial Kim Sung-il. Luckily, the Americans have recovered the craft’s pilot, who jettisoned in an escape pod off the coast of Hawaii. From this alien, named Kypa, the authorities learn that within the larger crashed spacecraft is a smaller ship, a prototype (called the Reaper) capable of self-repair built to harvest the crystals that the aliens need to save their home planet. The U.S. government wants that ship—and definitely doesn’t want it to fall into the hands of the Russians or the Chinese. Fresh from her fiance’s funeral, Ava is recruited to sneak into North Korea under an assumed identity, steal the Reaper, pilot it (using alien technology), rescue any alien survivors, blow up the mothership, and make it back to friendly airspace. In short, it’s the mission Ava has been waiting for her entire life, and she has nothing left to lose. Hosea writes with imagination and humor, as here, when an astrophysicist-turned-alien-handler introduces Kypa to a human bathroom: “Kypa was fascinated with the toilet and sink, insisting that Neil show him how they operated. Neil turned on the faucet, then sat on the toilet and demonstrated how it worked. He had no idea how to potty train an alien, and hoped Kypa would figure the rest out for himself.” The author’s attempts to convey deeper emotions sometimes fall flat, but as pure escapism, the novel has much to offer.
An entertaining SF adventure with military and espionage elements.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2020
ISBN: 9781735750132
Page Count: 510
Publisher: Grandizer
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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