A somewhat scattered SF adventure tale, but one that may appeal to nonlinear thinkers.
Warden’s debut SF novel offers a tale of an outer-space mission and hidden agendas.
The people of early 22nd-century Earth, unified under a one-world government, look forward to the launch of an expedition to the distant reaches of Saturn, which has suddenly and mysteriously developed a polar ice cap. The surprise choice as captain is Courtney Voth, a 25-year-old Canadian science prodigy. She once underwent radical treatment for a brain tumor, which caused her to permanently lose her hair, and she anonymously posed for a steamy, unauthorized photo shoot at a museum meteorite exhibit, whose photos became famous. Cloistered conspiracy theorists suspect that Courtney could be the tool of theoretical aliens, assumed to have been secretly controlling mankind for ages. Courtney, meanwhile, notices that many of her Saturn crew have cloak-and-dagger backgrounds in the military; one is concealing his role as the recent assassin of an island-nation dictator who tormented her people with forced anorexia. Before the mission is through, it will encounter a pantheon of weird and whimsical aliens, and in the aftermath, Courtney receives a considerable gift. Readers who are well grounded in SF may recall The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, the 1984 cult movie whose quirky style, so Hollywood legend goes, was due in part to numerous reshoots and re-edits. This narrative hops between the disparate characters, situations, and crises in a similar manner, seldom lingering long enough on any of them to find a sure footing or a consistent tone. However, as a comedy/satire, it feels like something from the lighter spectrum of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and as a first-contact story, it’s something that’s notably unusual for the genre. However, readers may be distressed that, even in the future, social media stars are still ascendant.
A somewhat scattered SF adventure tale, but one that may appeal to nonlinear thinkers. (science fiction)Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5255-9917-0
Page Count: 186
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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