A somewhat wooden science-fiction thriller that drifts into existential—even mystical—territory.
Moskovitz concludes his science-fiction trilogy with this novel about the secret origin—and potential future—of humanity.
Advances in science have done away with the need for religion—at least until evidence of intelligent design is discovered encoded into people’s DNA. The Church of the Double Helix rises as a new religious force, its worship built around musical translations of messages in the DNA code—messages from beings in a parallel universe detailing the creation of humanity. Fifteen-year-old prodigy Natasha Takana attends its services every Sunday, attempting to decipher the incomplete message. “A dying civilization in a parallel world, facing annihilation, had reached across the boundary between worlds to preserve its legacy. What, Natasha wondered, were the events that had driven them nearly to extinction?” Had anyone from that world survived? Natasha manages to ride the music into that parallel dimension, where the Creators themselves offer her a warning for the future. Elsewhere, journalist Lena Holbrook is investigating a remote back-to-basics commune in Oregon. She is particularly interested in a couple who live there with their preternaturally gifted daughter, Macklyn. Meanwhile, a small group of genetically engineered immortals known as Lazarus plot to gain control of Natasha or Macklyn, or both, and thereby breed a new generation of superhumans. Moskovitz’s prose is reliably lean and exact: “Abraham began his rounds just after daybreak. After the previous day’s squall and a light rain during the night, the sand underfoot was damp and dense and the fruit on the trees glistened.” The novel draws together the storylines of previous books in the Brink of Life trilogy in a way that is thematically coherent, if not exactly emotionally satisfying. The characters here are stiffer than in past works, and the narrative feels a bit less organic. Moskovitz, who also wrote The Brink of Life (2019), asks questions that are ambitious and vast—about the nature of humanity, the origin of life, the future of the planet—and the novel is short enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The book makes its landing without coming apart, but it does so without the panache fans of the previous volumes have likely hoped for.
A somewhat wooden science-fiction thriller that drifts into existential—even mystical—territory.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73417-892-0
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Fluke Tale Productions
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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