A slow-starting but ultimately gripping examination of leadership tendencies and group dynamics in an SF environment.
In Routh’s debut SF series starter, a group of six near strangers face the challenges of living and working together on humanity’s first moon settlement.
In the near future, climate disaster and global pandemic have taken their tolls on the planet and its population. Gaia Enterprises is founded in response: a corporation that designs climate-resilient communities and innovates new habitats that allow flooded and ravaged cities to recuperate. When Gaia puts in a bid for a project to build a settlement on Earth’s moon, they put out a global call for engineers, life-support technicians, and pilots, opening the doors of their previously closed ranks. World-renowned designers Troy Bruin and Xavier Consus are set to head the project, but the four remaining spots on the team must be determined by trials. Gaia’s leadership concocts a slew of challenges set to test the candidates for ingenuity, acumen, survival skills, and, above all, the ability to collaborate in close quarters for an extended period. The novel is divided into three parts—“The Call Out,” “Selection,” and “The SimHub”—the first of which dedicates a chapter to each applicant’s perspective, which offers readers glimpses into their lives and their decisions to apply. However, this choice immediately puts the narrative out of focus, as giving each individual player their due may have the effect of spreading readers’ interest too thin. These sections also have a tendency toward lengthy, explanatory dialogue. After this, however, the plot picks up considerably when the candidates are formed into teams and set to task; this makes the novel hard to put down, as it gets readers invested in the high-stakes training modules that push the characters to mental and physical extremes and interested in the questionable politics within Gaia’s leadership. This offsets the initial, heavy-handed characterization, and readers will find themselves rooting for the candidates they hope to see make it to the SimHub—the simulated moon settlement that the final team will have to live on and develop for a year.
A slow-starting but ultimately gripping examination of leadership tendencies and group dynamics in an SF environment.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2022
ISBN: 9780645521214
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Inner Compass Australia Pty Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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