Although heavy with high-tech terms, this time-travel novel’s engaging plot and all-too-human characters make it a pleasure...
The precarious decisions of a time traveler serve as the basis for this chilling debut sci-fi thriller.
Mary, a dancer and historian, is the kind of person that men admire and other women envy: She’s smart, funny, and has a keen sense of self and of the world around her. She understands that her petty problems—the lost love of a fiance, difficult parental relationships, strange co-workers—really have no impact on the greater world. That, in part, is why she’s the perfect choice to travel to the station Janus, a kind of super–time machine that places its crew in a kind of limbo between the real world and historical events. Mary is one of a select group that’s trying to figure out who’s been tearing apart history in small but injurious ways. This mysterious time traveler leaves clues behind, but the crew still finds it difficult to know when or where he will go next. Galaini provides a tight sci-fi narrative, blending his intriguing theories of how humanity might bend time into a compelling plot. His characters are well-spoken, realistically flawed and fascinating, and the author uses their voluntary captivity to show how people can crack in stressful, tight environments. The very idea of changing the past should be revolting to the educated Mary—whether it be a friend’s injury or the outcome of a major historical event, such as World War II. Yet her isolation and mental distress eventually cause her to think that even murder seems sensible: “What use is dedicating your life to study history…if you aren’t going to change it? What good would I be as a spectator?” she asks her android friend, Magus. The story, with its heavy emphasis on science and technology, can sometimes feel bogged down by complex concepts, at the cost of accessibility. The pacing suffers a bit as a result, as some readers may need to pause simply to figure out exactly what the characters are saying, but that also is what makes this novel so intriguing, as most readers will care enough about Mary’s journey to make their way through the jargon. The tale of her struggle to find the humanity in history and the emotion in science is worth the effort.
Although heavy with high-tech terms, this time-travel novel’s engaging plot and all-too-human characters make it a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1481049450
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2013
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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