Artful social parody in a towering hypercontemporary mode, superbly scored for a chorus of wind-up cuckoos bleakly coming...
Fearlessly wild and weird debut brain fragments from the mind of Derby, creative futurologist.
Derby’s 20 dandies have appeared in such deliriously sophisticated journals as Failbetter, Fence, Pindeldyboz, 3rd Bed, and 5 Trope, not to mention Conjunctions and American Journal of Print, some of which are online literary pit stops wherein Derby has gathered emotionally hyperbolic fans by the dozens who delight in heavy-water stories and in sucking the creamsicle of death. Heavy-water stories sink to the bottom and allow lighter works to rise and shimmer. After all, these were the Super Flat Times—“years that did not seem to pass so much as inflate crazily almost to the bursting point, break, and collapse, withered and damp, only to be replaced by another weepy, indistinguishable abrasion. That we survived at all is a monument in itself, but we will soon pass, and the parks, too, will gradually lose their meaning, as each successive generation of children wears the concrete structures down to pillowy stumps with their play.” Here are field-tested fragments from the store in the Hall of Memories describing the whole history of the Super Flat Times, collected especially for those who have been fortunate enough to have that whole history “swept from your head by the memory surgeons, so that all you remember is sitting up in the expansive Recovery Hall on Liberation Day with a bandage on your forehead and a sick taste in your mouth . . . ” We’re dragging the Sound Gun by hand. It has four settings: Make Scared. Hurt. Very Hurt. And Make Dead, which ruptures the enemy’s bowels. After the Food Ban we eat only meat from the Meat Tower. Even apples, corn, chocolate are prepared from various cured meats. The fortune cookie with my Chinese meal says only “Sorry.”
Artful social parody in a towering hypercontemporary mode, superbly scored for a chorus of wind-up cuckoos bleakly coming unwound.Pub Date: May 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73857-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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