Chic tech and a skilled, extraordinary hero fuel this diverting interplanetary adventure.
A resilient 20-something battles menaces across planets in Combs’ SF debut.
Hella Nazari, returning from military training on Saturn’s moon Titan, witnesses a devastating nuclear blast on her home world of Earth. She and others aboard their orbiting vessel escape in cryo-pods. Hella crash-lands on an Earth-like planet where she discovers she’s not alone. There’s good news and bad—Hella’s alarmed to discover she’s been in cryo-sleep for 20 years but happy to learn that Earth’s population wasn’t entirely wiped out. In the meantime, she’s evidently a prisoner of religious leader and political extremist Mordecai Abramovich, though he doesn’t immediately explain why. If she can escape, Hella can make it to Titan and reconnect with friends from the military academy. That’s a possibility if she can gain control of one of Abramovich’s faster-than-light ships, which can likewise get her back to Earth, where some of her adoptive family survives. But surviving isn’t easy when they’re up against the Regime, a cyborg army hunting the people Hella loves. Combs’ deliberate pacing suits the dense worldbuilding as readers learn about a distant-future Earth in the aftermath of catastrophic global warming (“The death of the Old World was self-inflicted by its people”). Technology shapes this novel’s cast—many extend their lives via synthetic organs or bodies, and cloning plays a significant role in the plot. There’s also Hella’s astonishing palm screen, with which she synthesizes a knife from “microscopic particles,” as well as the furry robot dog she befriends. Other characters do eventually crop up, leading to surprises. All the while, Hella proves smart and capable, often staving off panic attacks despite myriad intense situations. She winds up in action scenes that are few but memorable; Hella practices with such real-world blades as a Japanese katana and an Egyptian khopesh (sickle sword), both perfect for an enemy who requires decapitation to kill.
Chic tech and a skilled, extraordinary hero fuel this diverting interplanetary adventure.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798991187909
Page Count: 522
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
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
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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