This intellectualized sci-fi finale deftly delivers eccentricities and deities that set it apart from most shaggy-god...
Benevolent aliens save humans on Earth from extinction—but discord arises over the visitors’ heretical religious views.
In Moldovan’s (The World Ends Tomorrow, 2018, etc.) sci-fi trilogy, the nation of Esperanto dominated late 24th-century Earth, a planet of 28 billion people. But on Jupiter’s moon Europa, a colony of space folk known as the Fracony was monitoring and directing human affairs. Secretly allied with elites in the Esperanto government—mainly the popular chief executive (“secretary”) Clara—the Fracony came to the rescue after human-caused eco-disasters and plagues struck. Still, only half a billion people survived. With the Fracony now out in the open in this third installment, Clara grants the humanlike ETs (actually alien souls projected across the universe to be born in human bodies) a lab in Antarctica. But the public is displeased by the aliens’ mission: ascertain if Earth was originally a Fracony world billions of years ago, before the solar system’s resident god did a “reset” to create Homo sapiens as obedient worshippers. The Fracony’s polytheist cosmology—numerous gods who are, essentially, exponentially advanced aliens—outrages some Esperanto citizens, especially the tradition-bound priest and “Minister of Religious Affairs” Quinn. Quinn’s anti-Fracony campaign is manipulated by Arram, a leader of a secret society, who covets power. From assassination to media exploitation, Arram uses his allies, agents, and Quinn to remove rivals and turn public opinion against the Fracony. But Arram underestimates Clara, the Fracony, and even fanatical Quinn. Romanian-born Moldovan offers sci-fi more akin to philosophical musing (with a faintly satirical edge) than anything concretely speculative in terms of future super-science or tech. It would help if readers were familiar (as every 25th-century schoolkid is) with Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev’s categories of theoretical cosmic civilizations. Type I can use energy to dominate its home world; type II can harness the total energy of its star system; type III can control neighboring systems; and so on, each more godlike than the next. Even in 2427, humanity is only “type 0.” The Fracony are “type V” and not immune to literally playing god, even as the “real” deities they acknowledge may fall in the “type VI” or “type VII” stages. The author toys with religion here in the same way more conventional sci-fi writers handle FTL drives, robots, and exobiology. He throws in some truly inspired bits of Robert Anton Wilson-scale weirdness when Arram wrangles leaders of the other sinister secret societies so beloved of conspiracy fiction (Freemasons, Illuminati, Bilderberg, etc.) for meetings that end up being discussions of Euclidean versus non-Euclidean geometry. Which are important. Still, characters tend to be mouthpieces for ideas and symbols rather than three-dimensional players, and much of the loosey-goosey storyline is left unresolved by the end (the matter of Earth’s God, for example). What’s clear is Moldovan’s condemnation of dogmatic religious mania, as shown in one character’s summation of the dangerous Quinn: “Truth has nothing to do with this guy’s values. His problem is that whatever is not in his holy books does not exist.” No players come forth as Adam or Eve stand-ins, which is a remarkable feat for sci-fi in these territories.
This intellectualized sci-fi finale deftly delivers eccentricities and deities that set it apart from most shaggy-god stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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