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. Once they get inside the alien craft, the story moves seamlessly into dark, psychological horror as the crew struggles to survive and make sense of the incomprehensible dangers they find.Ī race against time to save humankind, a veteran astronaut trying to make things right, and an utterly strange and genuinely horrifying alien world to explore-this story’s got everything.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. With the fate of the human race hanging in the balance, the stakes couldn’t be higher, but each member of the Orion team has their own personal agenda, as well-particularly Jansen, who’s determined that this mission won’t end the way her last one did.

And that means Jansen’s getting back in Orion for one more mission.

NASA’s got just four months to put together a team to go and make contact with this alien object (before KSpace gets there, if possible) and try to find out what it wants. Still, when a mysterious object shows up in the solar system and starts slowing down, everyone from NASA to its private-sector competitor, KSpace, knows exactly what that means: This thing is alien. But the 2034 Orion disaster put an end not just to the Mars mission, but to Jansen’s career and any future crewed NASA missions along with it. Sally Jansen was supposed to be the first woman to walk on Mars.

A suspenseful, fast-paced story of first contact with an alien object that could destroy all life on Earth.

David wellington the last astronaut