Whatever it takes to put the genie back in the bottle, in other words. Lively, provocative fiction, graced by good writing...
Enrico Fermi died in 1954. Leo Szilard died in 1964. Robert Oppenheimer died in 1967. Didn’t they?
It is Millet’s (George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, 2000) happy conceit that they did, but, by some weird blip of the time-space continuum, they’ve come back to life and landed in northern New Mexico. These three men, writes Millet in a characteristically poetic turn, made possible “the moment when a speck of dust acquires the power to engulf the world in fire.” All are a little put off by the contours the world has taken since they shuffled off the mortal coil; as Oppenheimer grumbles, “In my day there was ignorance too: ignorance is timeless. But at least we were ashamed of it.” Tooling around Los Alamos, Santa Fe and neighboring burgs in cheap sunglasses and borrowed rides, the three are eventually found out, one by one, by a suitably retiring librarian, Ann, who is inclined to be maudlin, unlike her landscaper husband Ben, servant to the nouveaux riches of the high country. Ann meets Fermi and Oppenheimer in the produce aisle of the corner grocery, Oppenheimer wielding a Daikon radish that “resembled a club, and she thought blunt instrument.” With Szilard in tow, the fissionable four set about trying to unmake the atomic era, wending their way across a landscape made ever so slightly ominous by the knowledge that the sky can fall at any minute. Along the way, the scientists have plenty of opportunities to ponder the mysteries of contemporary culture, especially when it develops that a whole lot of born-again Christians take it into their heads that the three are the Holy Trinity—think Trinity Site—and that Oppenheimer is “the risen messiah,” to which Szilard sagely remarks, “People are free to interpret our work as they choose. That is both their right and their privilege.”
Whatever it takes to put the genie back in the bottle, in other words. Lively, provocative fiction, graced by good writing and a refreshingly offbeat worldview.Pub Date: July 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-932360-85-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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