A welcome but less than satisfying reunion with beloved characters and their universe.
In the long-awaited sequel to Brain Plague (2000), Chrysoberyl of Valedon, an artist with a colony of sentient microorganisms in her brain, is again awash on a sea of troubles (sometimes literally).
Chrys and her micros, the creative strain known as the Libertines, are somewhat overcommitted these days. While they collectively work on Chrys’ controversial light paintings, they are also responsible for multiple large architectural projects, including an entire floating city on the ocean moon of Shora—if she can only manage to get approval for her design from multiple stakeholders. Chrys is also hoping to remodel the Underworld, the lower layers of her city of Iridis, inhabited by the poor and desperate. The nobles of Valedon would simply prefer to bury the Underworld and relocate its inhabitants, as so-called “cancerplasts” are rooting there, causing earthquakes that shake the city and threaten to undermine it permanently. Meanwhile, the masters—micros that seek to take over their host, not work with it—have mutated into Traders, capitalists that use financial incentives to encourage their hosts to succumb to their control and who are no longer as easy to detect. In order to flush them out, Chrys has incorporated microscopic quantum computing units within herself, which collectively threaten to achieve sentience in their own right, which many see as a threat. And this barely scratches the surface of all the intrigue connected to the continuing fight for nonhuman sentient rights and political shakeups on both Valedon and Shora. Slonczewski is fond of overloading her characters with difficulties, but this story seems to take that tendency to an extreme. There is almost no letup to the implausible amount of burdens and responsibilities that others pile upon Chrys; she is allowed very little time to enjoy her unique position as a successful artist and a wealthy woman with a fascinating creative collective in her brain. Perhaps it’s her micros that prevent Chrys from having a nervous breakdown, even as they add to her stress. Ultimately, these tensions build to a crisis point, but the resolution afterward is rife with dangling and even expanding plot threads, suggesting that the author has merely chosen a place to rest, not to conclude. Presumably we won’t have to wait another 25 years to find out?
A welcome but less than satisfying reunion with beloved characters and their universe.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781647101732
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Caezik SF & Fantasy
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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