![]() ![]() 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.Ī tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Ī processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal. ![]() 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. 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. 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. The ending is open, and the reader discovers little about the big-picture universe beyond Aeroom, though the fuzzy details throw the author’s themes into sharper focus.Ī brief, digestible SF narrative parable in an Orwellian vein.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. The brief, near-novella length benefits the plainly told tale, in a manner somewhat akin to Lois Lowery’s The Giver the novel is YA-friendly but not condescending, light on spectacle and action but touching on profound ideas of social engineering and planned human ecologies (“While I accepted the importance of only the right people having sway in society, the system still seemed too harsh”). Borrowing the identity of a disenchanted person who did pass the exams, Arian slips in with a batch of fresh Power initiates on a reconnaissance mission to learn innermost secrets of the Power, and-perhaps-of the nature and purpose of amnesiac Aeroom itself. His frustration (and determination to find his absentee father, a Power member) makes him an easy recruit for the Dissenters, a group demanding that the test requirements be relaxed to allow for a wider pool of new leaders. Tests (machine-administered, more like quick medical scans) for measuring intellect and “bias” determine the tiny number of citizens who advance to Aeroom’s ruling elite, known as “the Power.” The protagonist, Arian, is a youth whose test scores were almost but not quite good enough to gain entry to the Power. Despite Aeroom’s isolation, studying other cultures and societies is a popular pastime. In some ways, Aeroom is a technological utopia, fully automated, where nobody needs to work or go hungry. It has a population of 3.5 million, little to no family relationships or religion, and no history-in fact, everyone’s memories seem to grow indistinct after 10 years. The author sets this SF allegory in a futuristic, enclosed community called Aeroom. A society determines its ruling elite via a rigorous testing system, but dissenting forces demand a change in Suntharam’s SF novel.
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