A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.
Robotics enthusiast and wicked storyteller Wilson follows up a masterful fantasy novel (The Clockwork Dynasty, 2017, etc.) with a collection of 14 kindred, often creepy stories.
Any fan of Wilson’s should definitely pick up this paperback original, composed of stories clipped from pulpy collections like The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013) and sprinkled with a few richly imagined anomalies. In the opener, “Miss Gloria,” a robot named Chiron resurrects himself time after time until his ward can fend for herself. In the tear-jerker “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever,” an astrophysicist spends one last day with his 3-year-old daughter. A mechanical man questions the nature of his identity in “Jack, the Determined.” Seemingly a master of many subgenres, Wilson can nod to cyberpunk in “The Executor,” hard science fiction in “Helmet,” and speculative horror in “Blood Memory.” He grounds his characters, even in worlds disappearing before their eyes, by giving them identities through their occupations: we meet a meteorologist in “Foul Weather” and a taxonomist in “Garden of Life,” both trying so hard to understand a world torn asunder by forces they can’t understand. As one imagines he might, Wilson pays fan service to longtime readers with a Robopocalypse story, “Parasite,” set in the trenches of war and starring Lark Iron Cloud and a lovely steampunk slice from the world of The Clockwork Dynasty, “One for Sorrow,” starring the ever childlike avtomat Elena Petrova. These tales sound thrilling, and they often are, but Wilson has a special talent for wringing emotion out of his tech-tinged stories, from the love of a grandfather in “The Nostalgist” to the awful longing of an avatar who misses his true love in “God Mode.” Wilson sticks the landing with “Special Automatic,” a story that channels the movie My Bodyguard by way of a Frankenstein-ian automaton.
A lush and imaginative collection of stories that brings real emotion to hard science fiction.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-97201-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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