Solid, old-school space adventure and intrigue.
Humankind’s mission to colonize a distant planet suffers a disaster in orbit, leaving a handful of survivors marooned.
DuBoff launches an SF series set in humanity’s spacegoing “Commonwealth” far future by raising the curtain on a fraught crash landing on the Earthlike-planet Aethos by escape pods from a doomed colony ship that barely managed to give the evacuation order. Only a few dozen of the thousands of would-be settlers reach the surface alive, falling short of the plateau meant to be their new homestead site on the otherwise uninhabited (well…supposedly uninhabited) planet. The first to meet and team up among the survivors are attractive “xenobiologist” Anya Rojas and a resourceful, mysterious passenger calling himself Evan who intended to start a new life on the stellar frontier. Gradually negotiating a path through predatory animals and poisonous plants, the pair head for the smoldering remains of the military escort ship accompanying their vessel, which also catastrophically crashed. Evidence proves both craft were brought down deliberately. But why? Are the murderous perpetrators on Aethos with them? Anya even begins to suspect Evan, who hints at a former career in the military and security forces but is obviously hiding much. The first half of the narrative is an efficient SF robinsonade with a Golden Age vibe. At about the midpoint, when separate masses of supporting antagonists materialize out of the astro-foliage, the story leans into treasure-hunt skullduggery with some fine ambiguity about who are the good guys and the bad guys (if anyone is a good guy). “Don’t trust anyone you may meet, regardless of who they say they are,” reads a typical piece of cosmic-commando advice before the heroes are thrown into the fray, which includes space pirates, space organized crime, space corrupt politicians, and the possibility of first contact with an alien. Even with dialogue referencing strange “energy readings” and altered gravity, the jungles, forests, and escarpments of Aethos will strike most adventure-seeking readers as territory not all that far removed from old favorites such as Tarzan’s Opar or B. Traven’s Sierra Madre.
Solid, old-school space adventure and intrigue.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781965614013
Page Count: 374
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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