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. This SF thriller provides yet more evidence that Scalzi (The Human Division, 2013, etc.) is a master at creating appealing commercial fiction.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. There’s only one real suspect from the get-go, so most of the mystery lies in determining his motives and finding the evidence to make an arrest before his plan can be fulfilled but the novel-which contains plenty of action, great character development, vivid and believable worldbuilding and a thought-provoking examination of disability culture and politics-is definitely worth the ride. Rookie FBI agent and Haden survivor Chris Vance and Vance's new partner, troubled former Integrator Leslie Vann, must find the culprit before an even more devastating act is committed. Right before a major rally by Haden activists to protest a law cutting support for survivors, a series of murders and the bombing of a major pharmaceutical company suggest that someone has developed the ability to take over Integrators’ bodies against their will. Government-funded research has allowed the locked-in Haden's syndrome survivors to flourish in a virtual environment, and to interact with the real world via humanoid robots known as “threeps.” They can also use the bodies of a small group of Haden survivors known as “Integrators,” who have found that they can allow their bodies to be controlled by others. In the near future, a meningitislike disease has killed millions and left a small percentage of survivors "locked in"-fully conscious, but unable to move any part of their bodies.
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