As a guide to sailors this book is not to be trusted," remarks Ursula Le Guin of her latest collection of stories. "Perhaps it is too sensitive to local magnetic fields." Local magnetic fields or not, these 20 variously pointed swings through the compass headings of charted and uncharted existence have an odd tendency to steer us back to certain shores. And very nicely kept shores they are, filled with a steady perspicuous light and the sound of a clear, thoughtful voice saying fine and well-phrased things about the nobility of human aspiration. In some future Armageddon, for instance, a librarian crawls through the smoke of his burning library to save a few books from the flames ("The Phoenix"). Or: as mankind prepares literally to drown in the consequences of its own folly, the lofty of soul send their voices out over the abyss by way of playing the viola and inventing the perfect solar battery ("The New Atlantis"). And: in a society of punitive mind-censorship, a candidate for memory-erasure dreams of Beethoven and brotherhood ("The Diary of the Rose"). But, if these are the Le Guin of "literary" science-fiction, also on display here is her marvelous and unpredictable streak of comic invention: "Schredinger's Cat" explores the celebrated paradox of subatomic phenomena being altered by the very act of observing them; the even more irresistible "Intracom" is a kind of manic allegory about a pregnancy projected as an event aboard a spaceship. Furthermore, unlike most practitioners of speculative fiction, Le Guin is also genuinely interested in small lives observed in minutely sympathetic detail—as in "Malheur County" (an elderly woman and her son-in-law) or "Two Delays on the Northern Line" (a brief diptych set in the fictional Eastern country of Orsinia). And her rich feel for the past as well as the future is reflected in the gem of the collection: "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb," a celebration of Venice as remembered by someone who will never see it again. Le Guin can be awfully cloying when she utters grave and euphonious pieties. But, for the most part, there are inexhaustible playings and seeings and imaginings—from a shrewd and various writer who can think something through till it seems to cohere in the mind's eye.
Pub Date: July 21, 1982
ISBN: 0060914475
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1982
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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