A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.
A workplace drama set in the 22nd century on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet.
Aboard the interstellar spacecraft the Six Thousand Ship, Earth-born humans and their bioengineered humanoid counterparts work together according to well-established company protocols. Their mission is to curate and tend the mysterious, alluring, and perhaps even sentient objects brought up from the surface of New Discovery, the Earth-like planet whose exploration is the Six Thousand Ship’s mission. The ship itself is tightly run, with employees in place for every conceivable need—be it laundry, reeducation, or cremation—and the labor does not seem to be difficult. It soon becomes apparent, however, that something is disrupting the workflow on the Six Thousand Ship. The objects are impacting their human and humanoid caretakers in different ways; eliciting erotic responses in some, paranoia in others, an uneasy sense of maternal responsibility or a near catatonic state of existential quandary in still others of the crew. In concordance with, or perhaps as the result of, the growing sense that the objects exist “in communion” with the employees, a rift between the human, and therefore mortal, and the humanoid, and therefore capable of being endlessly “reuploaded,” workers is having deleterious—even dangerous—effects on workplace productivity. To address this problem, a committee of impartial mediators has spent the last 18 months interviewing crew members and compiling the resulting recordings into the document of this book. The result is both familiar in its petty irritations and clandestine attractions (“In the line in the canteen I suddenly realize I feel a kind of tenderness for Cadet 14”) and unsparingly strange confessions (“I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught up under my nails like fish eggs....I feel this has something to do with the objects in the rooms”) that bode ill for the increasingly fractious crew. In place of a dedication, Ravn gives thanks to installation artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund for the material inspiration for the book, yet, even without knowing what Hestelund’s work looks like, the world Ravn has created is familiar enough in its tropes and human(oid) emotions to infect the reader’s imagination.
A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3135-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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