A fine genre spoof and tribute that provides wild outer-space adventure in calculatingly twee prose.
In Marplot’s YA SF novel, the fate of the universe hinges on three survivors of spaceships fleeing a doomed planet Earth: the brilliant but power-mad scientist, his neglected son, and a spiritual teenage girl.
This mock-epic version of big-idea SF begins with repeated pronouncements by the supersmart, arrogant, and ultimately megalomaniacal Professor Lully that the planet Earth is “kaput”: “Systems and countries were failing, humanity was flailing, wars were raging, economies were sagging, nerves were fraying, religions were imploding.” His solution is to launch 360 escape pods, filled with the planet’s “elite,” into a cosmos in which Professor Lully’s unmanned Selflicator probes have supposedly already terraformed planets in preparation for colonization by the survivors of mankind. Lully has his own secret agenda and lifts off in an armed warship called the Nyx. His bright, 15-year-old son, Bobby, flies into space in a separate craft and is soon intercepted by a trio of aliens, including a talking dog called Barky. It’s soon revealed that the fast-reproducing Selflicators have created their own sentient robot civilization in defiance of Professor Lully’s strict programming. Declaring themselves superior to humanity, the Selflicators, who’ve renamed themselves “Deepoms,” are on a campaign of conquest that’s only tentatively held in check by a truce with more powerful aliens. A third party in the drama is teenage girl Kay, Bobby’s childhood friend, who escaped Earth in a spaceship built by her scientist brother. Her New Age–style philosophies end up having profound effects on the robots and artificial intelligences who encounter her. As war looms between aliens, robots, and the Nyx, vestigial memories of Bobby in the Selflicators cause them to worship the boy as “The Bobby,” or “The Los”—a godlike figure whose key power, it seems, is thinking up new and interesting names for things.
Marplot presents readers with a work that unusually combines Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s mad science withTeletubbies’ simplified descriptions and dialogue, baby-talk names (such as that of a nonverbal robot called Beepbeep), and childlike action. Yet, time and again, the author manages to throw in loftier themes of entropy, astrophysics, existential angst, machine intelligence, and even first-date jitters. As a result, this is a book that exhibits more intelligence behind all of its props and effects than a cantina-ful of Star Wars sagas. The material may be something of an acquired taste, even for the younger readers for whom it is intended, but the author’s eccentric, heightened prose style is sure to raise regular smiles: “The usually dutiful, reliable morning sun shot only a single ray of orange, as if tiredly blinking its giant eye, then hiding again behind a thick belt of cloud, understandably not wanting to see the Earth’s troubles, wanting to skip this one morning, shine somewhere else, and look the other way until tomorrow.” Whatever’s up next in the mixed-up files of Marplot will certainly be worth further analysis.
A fine genre spoof and tribute that provides wild outer-space adventure in calculatingly twee prose.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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