Synopsis
The stunning debut novel from the star of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". The United States of 2019 is a very different place. Economic depression, an enormous earthquake, and the assassination of a black President-elect have turned the country into a war zone. Four people, each as different and troubled as the next, are the nation's last hope. But can they overcome the devastation and build a new world?
Reviews
Another Star Trek alumnus gets bitten by the writing bug. Here, it's Burton, who played Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His fiction debut is a terribly earnest and straightforward novel about the horrors that occur after America is shattered by a breakdown in race relations. Dr. Rene Reynolds is the inventor of the Neuro-Enhancer, a device with almost mystical healing abilities that also creates telepathic powers in its wearers. After Reynolds demonstrates the device to financiers, she is kidnapped?but not before she desperately thrusts the only existing copies of her computer disks into the hands of a homeless man, Leon Cane, whose life was shattered during the race riots. When Reynolds sends out a telepathic call for help, Cane, Amy LaDue, a plucky child living on the streets, and Jacob Fire Cloud, a Lakota medicine man with a vision, head toward Chicago to aid her and to save the world from destruction. Burton's workmanlike prose is sufficient for the task of displaying his characters' virtues, but the world he builds is muddled and less than credible. His name recognition, however, along with the novel's humane and caring moral message, should ensure respectable sales. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Actor Burton (Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation, etc.) debuts with a novel set in a chaotic 21st-century US, where the assassination of the first African-American president and a disastrous earthquake centered on the New Madrid fault have precipitated social and economic collapse and civil war. Dr. Rene Reynolds has invented the Neuro-Enhancer, a device that helps the body boost its immune system to banish all disease. But rival Dr. Randall Sinclair--he has ties to monstrous fascist militias who roam the countryside, abducting nonwhite citizens for use as involuntary organ donors--having decided that the Neuro-Enhancer must be suppressed kidnaps Rene and her prototype device. As a side effect of testing the machine on herself, however, Rene finds she has psychic powers and yells for help telepathically. Three people hear the summons and are drawn into a rescue attempt: derelict and former NASA scientist Leon Cane; orphan Amy Ladue (she thinks the voice in her head is her mother's); and Lakota shaman Jacob Fire Cloud, whose vision quest has shown him how White Buffalo Woman will prevent the terrible Great Shaking. Set forth in assured prose, with a well-developed plot permeated by an almost palpable sadness at the folly of race hatred. With this wise, above-average debut, Burton is poised to tackle bigger, more ambitious themes. (TV satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Boldly following where, with the most consistent success, Captain James T. Kirk (aka Bill Shatner) has gone before, another Star Trek thespian joins authorial ranks. Burton (Geordi LaForge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation) has produced a thoroughly readable example of the post-holocaust yarn that has its share of first-novel awkwardness but much solid writing, too. It foresees a near-future U.S. in crisis--indeed, in collapse--after the assassination of the first African American president, a new New Madrid^-fault earthquake (the 1811 original remains the most powerful in American historical times), and other catastrophes. Fortunately, Dr. Rene Reynolds has developed a method of enhancing human brain functioning to permit self-healing. There are, however, too many who see her invention only as a fount of profits. Salvation from this situation arises out of the unlikely alliance of a derelict former NASA engineer, a child, and a (stereotypical, alas) Native American shaman. Burton is only in the initial stage of his writing career and should not give up acting, but he has already mastered the art of keeping readers turning pages, well enough to probably win an audience larger than the substantial-enough devotees of all things starry and trekky. Roland Green
American civilization crumbles after a civil war pitting blacks against whites and a devastating earthquake. Salvation resides in the hands of a black woman scientist, Dr. Rene Reynolds, inventor of a neuroenhancer that cures all diseases. When she is kidnapped, her telepathic cry for help reaches three people who travel across the country to save her. Star TrekR actor Burton's characterizations are shallow, transitions between events betray a TV-like impatience, and the plot was rendered better in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's Lucifer's Hammer (Fawcett, 1985). Buy only on demand.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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