An often entertaining but overstuffed series entry.
A robot gains consciousness in Stewart’s interplanetary SF sequel.
For readers who missed Singularity Part 1: The Dale Chronicles (2023), the author provides a primer at the start of this installment before picking up the action on Mars in the year 2055. Roberta (short for Robotic-Perturbational-Arduino), an “advanced android,” is assisting a mission on the red planet; eight Earth astronauts were sent to set up a semipermanent settlement there, and six have died. Things have deteriorated on Earth, where a viral infection has caused all mammals to become sterile. As a result, Mission Control tell Roberta to surgically remove and cryogenically store the reproductive organs of the last two astronauts, when they die, and then eject their bodies into space. After doing so, Roberta must care for their two young daughters. When they return to Earth, she continues to serve as caretaker for the pair, who become known as the “Martian Girls”; meanwhile, she begins to experience emotions for the first time. Roberta learns to accept her feelings, has difficulties raising the human children, and forms new relationships with other robots on Earth, all of which result in some touching scenes. However, this tone doesn’t last long, as the plot barrels forward through several years and one catastrophe after another. After murderous attackers storm Megan’s high school prom, Roberta finds herself on the run before finding an anti-technology commune in the desert. This intriguing predicament, however, doesn’t last long either, as Roberta is soon thrown into a new adventure. There’s plenty of action, but the staging isn’t consistently engaging (“The spiders used their lasers to shoot the drones, but they were too fast to track. The drones could fly quicker and dart around faster than the spiders could target them”). To counteract this, Stewart often relies on onomatopoeia to spice things up (“BOOM! CRASH! The lights in the room flickered. SIZZLE BOOM!”). There are intriguing ideas introduced throughout, but they’re unfortunately left underdeveloped to make way for plot developments.
An often entertaining but overstuffed series entry.Pub Date: March 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798321376270
Page Count: 546
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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