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. It was worth the wait since Harrison’s last (Signs of Life, 1997).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. Does it all add up? Well, objectively speaking, not altogether-and perhaps that’s the point. All three protagonists may find answers at the other end of a wormhole generated millions of years ago by vanished, highly advanced aliens.Ī profoundly thoughtful, complex, fascinating, and sometimes bewildering mosaic.

Rudely awakened by the Cray sisters, gangsters to whom he owes money, he ends up enslaved to a weird contraption that forces him to glimpse the future. In the same time frame, daredevil Ed Chinese ran out of thrills and retreated into computer-generated dreams. Sadly, meanwhile, the owners want their ship back. Seria Mau Genlicher, having stolen an advanced military spaceship, irreversibly altered her body to meld with the ship now, regretting her decision, she searches for a way to restore her body through ever more advanced computations. Four centuries in the future, the Tate-Kearney transformations have given humanity real-time control of the galaxy. To keep the Shrander at bay, he murders people. Michael has a personal problem, too: he’s being pursued by a terrifying entity called the Shrander, from whom he stole a strange pair of dice that may predict the future. Unfortunately, their sponsor, shady entrepreneur Gordon Meadows, may already have sold them to Sony.

In London 1999, math whiz Michael Kearney and his partner, American physics genius Brian Tate, pursue research that might ultimately allow them to code data in quantum events. Three narratives impinge upon one another and finally intermingle. Harrison’s new SF yarn-quantum space opera? science fiction serial-murder mystery? pyrotechnically paranoid projected physics?-arrives two years after its original British publication.

Light by m john harrison