![]() ![]() When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. 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 tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. 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. Infotainment: glum, dyspeptic, and depressing.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 last primates, half a billion years hence, subside with barely a gasp. Devolution, thereafter, continues rapidly. A millennium after the volcano, a group of British servicemen awaken from cryonic suspension to find that primitive post-humans have already lost the power of speech. Mars, meanwhile, is eaten up by the replicating machines, which go on to colonize the galaxy. Finally, in 2031, the volcano explodes, devastating Earth. Fifth-century Rome seethes with treachery. Politics, murder, and beer are invented before 10,000 b.c. ![]() Hand axes become popular about 1.5 million years ago. Five million years later, apes descend from the trees. Dinosaurs survive on Antarctica until ten million years ago. Primates evolve and adapt swiftly during the Tertiary. Brainy dinosaurs, unknown in the fossil record, become extinct in the Jurassic. Proto-primates beat the competition in the Cretaceous. Baxter ( Icebones, 2002, etc.) intersperses this with dramatic paleontological reconstructions and speculations. ![]() Meanwhile, robots on Mars succeed in replicating themselves. The planet's ecology and climate are threatened, the huge volcano on nearby Rabaul is close to exploding-and to cap it all, terrorists attack the conference. The token frame here concerns the journey of two friends, paleontologist Joan Useb and primatologist Alyce Sigurdardottir, to attend a conference in Darwin, Australia, in 2031. Bulky assemblage-it's a stretch to call this a novel-of animated dioramas endeavoring to illustrate the story of primate evolution.
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