As a guide to sailors this book is not to be trusted," remarks Ursula Le Guin of her latest collection of stories. "Perhaps it is too sensitive to local magnetic fields." Local magnetic fields or not, these 20 variously pointed swings through the compass headings of charted and uncharted existence have an odd tendency to steer us back to certain shores. And very nicely kept shores they are, filled with a steady perspicuous light and the sound of a clear, thoughtful voice saying fine and well-phrased things about the nobility of human aspiration. In some future Armageddon, for instance, a librarian crawls through the smoke of his burning library to save a few books from the flames ("The Phoenix"). Or: as mankind prepares literally to drown in the consequences of its own folly, the lofty of soul send their voices out over the abyss by way of playing the viola and inventing the perfect solar battery ("The New Atlantis"). And: in a society of punitive mind-censorship, a candidate for memory-erasure dreams of Beethoven and brotherhood ("The Diary of the Rose"). But, if these are the Le Guin of "literary" science-fiction, also on display here is her marvelous and unpredictable streak of comic invention: "Schredinger's Cat" explores the celebrated paradox of subatomic phenomena being altered by the very act of observing them; the even more irresistible "Intracom" is a kind of manic allegory about a pregnancy projected as an event aboard a spaceship. Furthermore, unlike most practitioners of speculative fiction, Le Guin is also genuinely interested in small lives observed in minutely sympathetic detail—as in "Malheur County" (an elderly woman and her son-in-law) or "Two Delays on the Northern Line" (a brief diptych set in the fictional Eastern country of Orsinia). And her rich feel for the past as well as the future is reflected in the gem of the collection: "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb," a celebration of Venice as remembered by someone who will never see it again. Le Guin can be awfully cloying when she utters grave and euphonious pieties. But, for the most part, there are inexhaustible playings and seeings and imaginings—from a shrewd and various writer who can think something through till it seems to cohere in the mind's eye.
Pub Date: July 21, 1982
ISBN: 0060914475
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1982
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
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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