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. Overextended and jarring, then, but imaginative and gripping in places.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. And we never learn what the Minds do, or what the Idiran religion consists of. Neither does his decision to fight for the brutal, fanatical Idirans against the vastly more civilized and appealing Culture add up. The mechanics of all this haven't been thought through-Horza's adventures, for instance (actually short stories tacked on), eclipse his supposedly supremely important mission. In pursuing the Mind, Horza finds himself fighting the same Idirans who are supposed to be his allies. His mission-numerous adventures intervene-is to capture a disabled Mind that has taken refuge in some ancient tunnels on a Planet of the Dead. Horza, a genetically engineered human with shape-shifting abilities, sides with the Idirans because he prefers biologicals to machines. Two far-future galactic empires are at war: the Earth-derived Culture, tolerant, unwarlike, vaguely communistic, is ruled by Minds, artificial intelligences of imponderable power and scope the Idirans, bulky, three-legged alien conquerors who have made warfare into a religion, are implacably opposed to the Minds.

From the author of The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass: a voluminous, sometimes exciting space-opera where character motivations are the most troubling of several knotty problems.

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