Impressive at the core. Readers who relished the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy will certainly enjoy this one.
From the author of The Stone in the Skull (2017, etc.), the first of a space opera trilogy featuring gabby pirates, a giant intelligent mantis, and a narcoleptic cat.
The galaxy is governed by the multispecies Synarche, though we’re told little of how it operates. Operating on the economic fringes are engineer Haimey Dz, her partner, pilot Connla Kuruscz, and their spaceship/AI, Singer, who make a living by locating and exploiting space wrecks. Their latest acquisition, horrifyingly, turns out to be the murdered remains of a vast, ancient spacegoing alien. Human pirates have stripped the corpse of its advanced technology, but after investigating, Haimey finds she’s acquired a nonsentient parasite that occupies her skin and confers strange new abilities to sense and manipulate gravity fields and navigate in hyperspace. This, we’ll eventually learn, is part of an elaborate piratical scheme to force Haimey to face the past she’s suppressed and divulge a secret she doesn’t know she knows, resulting in a confrontation between Haimey and sociopathic pirate Zanya Farweather—clearly the intent all along. Their opposing views on just about everything form the centerpiece of an extended debate contrasting immature and irrational human sociopolitical mores with, ultimately, the mature, reasoned forbearance displayed by powerful aliens. Bear, then, offers plenty of big, bold, fascinating ideas in a narrative that culminates in a double showdown with a dazzling array of said thoughtful beings, but to get us there the plot has to wheel through highly improbable convolutions. The main characters—MacGyver-ish Haimey with her angst-y self-censorship, absurdly dull Connla, a chirpy know-it-all AI that natters on about politics—annoy more often than they appeal. The whole package contrasts somewhat unfavorably with Bear’s fantasy works, where the characters realistically inhabit fanciful landscapes and stories grows organically from their interactions with it and each other.
Impressive at the core. Readers who relished the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy will certainly enjoy this one.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-0298-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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