A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.
Robotics enthusiast and wicked storyteller Wilson follows up a masterful fantasy novel (The Clockwork Dynasty, 2017, etc.) with a collection of 14 kindred, often creepy stories.
Any fan of Wilson’s should definitely pick up this paperback original, composed of stories clipped from pulpy collections like The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013) and sprinkled with a few richly imagined anomalies. In the opener, “Miss Gloria,” a robot named Chiron resurrects himself time after time until his ward can fend for herself. In the tear-jerker “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever,” an astrophysicist spends one last day with his 3-year-old daughter. A mechanical man questions the nature of his identity in “Jack, the Determined.” Seemingly a master of many subgenres, Wilson can nod to cyberpunk in “The Executor,” hard science fiction in “Helmet,” and speculative horror in “Blood Memory.” He grounds his characters, even in worlds disappearing before their eyes, by giving them identities through their occupations: we meet a meteorologist in “Foul Weather” and a taxonomist in “Garden of Life,” both trying so hard to understand a world torn asunder by forces they can’t understand. As one imagines he might, Wilson pays fan service to longtime readers with a Robopocalypse story, “Parasite,” set in the trenches of war and starring Lark Iron Cloud and a lovely steampunk slice from the world of The Clockwork Dynasty, “One for Sorrow,” starring the ever childlike avtomat Elena Petrova. These tales sound thrilling, and they often are, but Wilson has a special talent for wringing emotion out of his tech-tinged stories, from the love of a grandfather in “The Nostalgist” to the awful longing of an avatar who misses his true love in “God Mode.” Wilson sticks the landing with “Special Automatic,” a story that channels the movie My Bodyguard by way of a Frankenstein-ian automaton.
A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-97201-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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