Cellular-DNA science and aching hearts intertwine in a compelling SF sequel.
On a human-colonized planet, a rebel settler finds her loyalties tested by her ex, her new pilot/lover, and her small son who has unique DNA qualities.
Fedorak’s sequel to her SF debut, Children of Alpheios (2023), unfolds three years later. Hero Alina DeHerte is a rebel colonist on the distant planet Eamine, peopled by genetically modified humans, where the climate is harsh and native wildlife sometimes dangerous. But another threat is an authoritarian system under Chancellor Jade Graylin, leader of the settlement city Alpheios. Her regime’s economic partner, the genetic-engineering corporation Genodyne, is exploiting a generation of children (“Origins”) born on the planet, fated to develop astounding powers—and one of them is Alina’s epileptic son, Mandin. Defying the exploitation of their offspring, Alina and other dissidents fled to establish their own haven, Evesborough. The strife led to the end of Alina’s relationship with Alpheios’ law-and-order security chief Chance—who is Graylin’s son— even though he enabled her escape with Mandin. Now, Alina is engaged to an Evesborough man and Mandin’s seizures are controlled with medication. But Evesborough still struggles for supplies. In Alpheios, a civilian uprising brews after a reckless Genodyne rollout of an anti-aging drug unleashes a disease, and one of the victims is Alina’s mother. Alina’s DNA makeup points to a cure, and Chance wants a reunion with his son. Reluctantly, Alina agrees to a temporary visit to the city in a gene-science exchange deal. Amid the intrigue, Chance sees an opportunity to rekindle his ex’s ardor. Fedorak must keep a lot of balls in the air and plates (or petri dishes) spinning, and newcomers to the saga may be somewhat confused by the ensemble cast and the machinations. In the foliage are such compelling creations as “kronosapiens,” Genodyne’s mistreated, artificially evolved humanoids, both beastly and disturbingly advanced, and a hint of something even darker, “an ancient and foul entity lurking somewhere down tunnel four,” kept offstage this time. But, at least until a literally explosive final act, the double-helix intricacies of relationships and emotions have a priority over action and weaponry. Though the novel leaves many narrative threads unresolved, this is quality SF from an exciting, fresh voice in the genre.
Cellular-DNA science and aching hearts intertwine in a compelling SF sequel.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781509259021
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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