A call to arms2/1/2024 ![]() Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space-maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. ![]() She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. ![]() In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author. 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. 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. Dozens of alien species, none of them remotely convincing, numerous moronic discussions of the true nature of humanity-yet, with no plot or action or even much organization to intrude upon the alien maunderings, there's little danger that anyone will take this piece of nonsense seriously.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. Finally, even Will decides to fight for the Weave, despite knowing that the Weave regard humans as barbaric and dangerous. ![]() It turns out that humans alone have an aggressive, effective defense against Amplitur mental compulsion. Then the Amplitur attack Earth, but with Weave help are beaten off. But the peace-loving Weave, desperate for new warrior-allies, are very persuasive, and other contactees sign up to fight with alacrity, proving Will wrong. Eventually, the Weave discover Earth, and cautiously contact Cajun musician Will Dulac, who insists that humans will want nothing to do with either Weave or Amplitur. For millennia they have been at war with the Weave, a loose association of alien races opposed to the Amplitur. have a Purpose: to integrate all races into a single unit, whether the other races want to or not. The lobsterlike Amplitur, with their advanced science and mental-projective powers. The damned what? one is tempted to ask of this curious, alien-infested interstellar war/first-contact/nature-of-humanity yarn from the author of Into the Out Of (1986) and To the Vanishing Point (1988).
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