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. An intelligent and absorbing double-stranded narrative, generally well paced, accelerates to hyperspeed in the last few pages.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. Best of all, humanity’s overmind meets the Centauran overmind with astonishing consequences. Moreover, the Centaurans have sent a ship to make contact. Kyle, she learns, is indeed innocent, and Becky’s the victim of an overzealous and suggestive therapist. She builds a model that incorporates the substances specified in the previously decoded messages, climbs inside-and the thing folds her up into the fourth dimension! Not only that, but she’s able to plug into humanity’s collective unconscious, or overmind. Heather realizes that the Centauran messages, correctly arranged, form an unfolded four-dimensional hypercube. Even though Kyle’s attempt to demonstrate a working quantum computer fails, two mysterious groups-one offering megabucks and another message to decode, the other also offering megabucks while making veiled threats-want his work suppressed. Poor Kyle, meanwhile, knows he’s innocent-but, agonizingly, wonders whether he’s repressing memories of abusing Becky (their other daughter, Mary, inexplicably committed suicide). At first incredulous, Heather soon entertains horrid doubts. of Toronto psychologist and message decipherer Heather Davis is separated from husband Kyle Graves, a leading quantum computer researcher but then their daughter Becky accuses Kyle of abusing her. By 2017, messages from Alpha Centauri A have been arriving at Earth for ten years, but only the first few have been deciphered. Messages-from-space yarn from the versatile author of Illegal Aliens (1997), etc.
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