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.
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. 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. These matters aside: a seriously probing, thoughtful, intelligent piece of work, with more insight in half a dozen pages than most authors manage in half a thousand.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Things improve after that bumpy start, though the frequent dull interior monologues don't help. Here, surrounded by potential enemies, again threatened with assassination, Bren ponders the loyalties of his hosts as an antihuman faction comes close to provoking another war-a process exacerbated by the humans' own factional split into the planetbound and the spacefaring.
The paidhi, Bren Cameron, is caught up in a factional struggle and, after narrowly avoiding assassination, is spirited away by Tabini, leader of the pro-human faction, to an isolated estate. So the humans are confined to the island of Mospheira, and only their paidhi, or translator/technical liaison, is permitted to enter atevi society-the latter a complex of warring factions, loyalty codes, and assassination. Far-future alien-contact yarn from the author of Chanur's Legacy, The Goblin Mirror, etc., where, in a stuttering, episodic liftoff, we learn that a human colony ship, lost in space, luckily comes near a planet inhabited by humanoid "atevi." Later, the two species fight a war in which the humans' technological superiority barely compensates for their physical inferiority and lack of numbers.
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