Hard-charging, hard-combat SF for fans who thought Starship Troopers was too pacifistic.
Ares, a highly decorated, all-business soldier in Earth’s space-traveling future, leads his small, heavily armed, and wildly outnumbered team against enemy forces in Martelle’s SF novel.
Espenar Four is a rocky planet that has become a battleground for the military of the Human Force for Peace and a shadowy rival horde of aliens called the Scutigera, “A race of multi-legged bugs that crawled along the ground, with the ability to network their minds and coordinate.” The meter-long creatures carry beam weapons and are enigmatic, non-communicative, and implacably hostile. Humankind covets Espenar Four for its mining potential and fears the Scutigera will eventually spread their annihilating war to Earth. But politics and cultures do not concern the legendary Earth commando known only as Ares, nicknamed after the mythical god of war. Ares exists only to fight, carry out orders, protect his squad, achieve mission success, and defeat the enemy (honorably, not with sadism or vengeance). Ares and his team wear powered armor—each member wields the devasting strength of an army. But the bugs number in the millions and keep attacking, ignoring their own immense casualties. Ares must determine their true origin and weaknesses in the face of a looming, decisive bug assault on the HFP. Even casual SF readers will be reminded of the conflict concocted by Robert A. Heinlein in the iconic military SF classic Starship Troopers (1959). The premise is amplified here; while Heinlein used lengthy academy-instruction interludes to expound on warrior philosophy and military values, Martelle employs practically nonstop scenes of combat as his classroom. The fatalistic, punchy, and apothegm-rich prose (“The logic was irrefutable. As long as you lived, you had a chance to keep living. Once dead, it was too late”) should provide gamer-minded readers with plenty of diversion. It is only acknowledged in a scant way that Ares’ crew’s epic sacrifices are largely meaningless; if the humans win, they will likely just ravage Espenar Four for its resources and proceed to another world. The author, a retired Marine Corps officer, has positioned this yarn as the opener for a multivolume series.
Hard-charging, hard-combat SF for fans who thought Starship Troopers was too pacifistic.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781953062949
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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