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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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