The first gripping installment in a sci-fi series set in a future of fractious and dangerous alien apartheid.
A member of a visiting alien race becomes the subject of an orchestrated hunt on Earth.
In this sci-fi debut by an author team writing under a pseudonym, Earth in the near future has become a dystopian war zone since the event known as Hatred Day, when a portal opened in the atmosphere from the distant planet Armador. Through the portal had come members of an alien superrace called the Inborn, capable of great feats of physical strength and energy manipulation indistinguishable from sorcery. But the portal itself warps Earth’s biosphere, spoiling and mutating it, and the arrival of the Inborn sparks a 22-year conflict called The Inborn War and a worldwide hatred of these aliens, given vent every year on the anniversary of Hatred Day. The plot centers on an Inborn named Snofrid Yagami, whose friends seek to save her from the slave auction block of a filthy human-run ghetto in the city of Hollowstone. They succeed, despite some serious competitive bidding, only to realize that she’s experiencing a selective form of amnesia—she can’t recall specifics of her recent past or the identity of her friends. She scrambles to cope with the fallout of relationships she can no longer remember, with men like the munitions dealer Atlas Bancroft and the deadly state-sponsored killer Lucian Lozoraitis (“With hard angled brows, light stubble, and full chapped lips, he was an untidy sort of attractive; but his badger-grey eyes harbored a calculating flare”). The authorial device of giving Snofrid such a convenient case of amnesia wears thin and is never convincing as anything more than a means of making exposition possible. But this is a minor quibble in the face of the book’s smart and dazzling worldbuilding. The magic of the Inborn is intricately conceived, and the long-term ramifications of their arrival on Earth are worked out in thoroughly believable detail. The pleasingly complex plot moves its large cast of memorable characters through a carefully controlled escalation of dangers, with Snofrid and her comrades at the heart. This confident and captivating novel should leave readers eagerly anticipating future volumes.
The first gripping installment in a sci-fi series set in a future of fractious and dangerous alien apartheid.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972029-1-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Chrysanthalix Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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