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Overview
The year is 2017. Lucy Pavlov is the CEO of PavSoft Industries, home of a revolutionary operating system that every computer in the world runs on. Her personal wealth is immeasurable, her intelligence is unfathomable, and she's been voted World's Most Beautiful Woman for three years running. To put it simply - she has it all.
But not everything is quite right in Lucy's life. For starters, she has no memories prior to 2015. She also keeps having run-ins with a unicorn. And to make matters even worse, a bomb is hurtling through interstellar space, headed straight for Lucy - and the planet known as Earth.
Synopsis
The year is 2017. Lucy Pavlov is the CEO of PavSoft Industries, home of a revolutionary operating system that every computer in the world runs on. Her personal wealth is immeasurable, her intelligence is unfathomable, and she's been voted World's Most Beautiful Woman for three years running. To put it simply - she has it all.
But not everything is quite right in Lucy's life. For starters, she has no memories prior to 2015. She also keeps having run-ins with a unicorn. And to make matters even worse, a bomb is hurtling through interstellar space, headed straight for Lucy - and the planet known as Earth.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Tom Holt -- popular British author of dozens of novels, yet suffering from an undeservedly low profile in the USA -- owns a generous supply of all the talents needed to produce superb comedic fiction:
A capacious word-hoard full of strikingly outrageous metaphors and similes. ("For her, it was more like falling out of a window with a burst appendix and really bad toothache: there were three distinct ingredients, all urgent, all unsettling, all clamoring for her attention at the same time.")
A keen sense of the absurd.
A musician's sense of timing.
A dogged willingness to wring every last ounce of humor out of a conceit.
An ability to craft lovable, nebbishy Everymen and wicked, outsized villains, each exhibiting a full blend of vices and virtues.
A shameless enthusiasm for low pratfalls and puns.
A sophisticated command of arcane tidbits of fascinating information.
And when you factor in his admirable insider's grasp of science fiction and fantasy tropes, and a capacity to produce some genuine speculative insights, you get a fellow who can write rings around a mere Douglas Adams. In fact, one might measure his power in magnitudes of Sheckleys or Tenns.
Holt's latest, Blonde Bombshell, blends elements of Men in Black, John Carpenter's Dark Star, and even Lilo and Stitch to attain a frenzied carnival of comic chaos.
The highly advanced planet of Ostar is populated by genius canines, a race of doggie Stephen Frys. They have lately taken a dislike to Earth -- or Dirt, as they translate our name -- due to our annoying music broadcasts having finally reached across the lightyears to bewilder and bedevil them. They immediately dispatch one planet-busting missile to deal with us, but it vanishes from contact. Baffled, they launch a second, more cautiously. The intelligent bomb in orbit around Dirt sends down a manufactured spy in a human shell, who chooses the sly undercover name of Mark Twain. Twain's investigations eventually lead him to Lucy Pavlov, the world's smartest and richest woman, a female uber-Bill Gates. Figuring into the resulting machinations to stave off destruction of the planet are two rival Ostar spies, and George Stetchkin, alcoholic corporate lackey transmogrified into "a being of pure text" by the aliens.
Full of ingenious twists and reversals, this extremely silly story subverts its own farce with a clever examination of what being human means, and how different and opposed cultures might get along. Important and highly topical themes, whether you walk on two legs or four.
--Paul Di Filippo
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Driven mad by the “lethally insidious... toxic aural garbage” that is Terran music, the canine inhabitants of the planet Ostar send Mark Two, a bomb so smart it composes violin sonatas, to blow up Earth. Insatiably curious, Mark Two delays its mission, takes human form, and explores Earth to find out why the Mark One bomb vanished. After encountering software revolutionary Lucy Pavlov, a unicorn, two men who probably aren’t werewolves, and drunken corporate stooge George Stetchkin, Mark decides not to complete his mission, precipitating confrontations with a third bomb (named Bob) and the entire Ostar war fleet. Holt, well-known in the U.K. for historical flights of fancy, is set to make a splash in the U.S. with this wickedly funny, take-no-prisoners mashup of love, Armageddon, activists, and one of the universe’s most valuable commodities: octopi. (June)Kirkus Reviews
Riotous science-fiction social commentary, from the author of May Contain Traces of Magic (2009, etc.). In Novosibirsk, genius scientist turned banker George Stetchkin wonders, during his bouts of sobriety, how somebody has removed, without trace, $50 trillion from various bank vaults around the world. Not far away, industrialist Lucy Pavlov ponders why she has no memory of her childhood despite the fact that she's a computer-programming whiz whose products have conquered the world. Meanwhile, in space far above Novosibirsk, Mark Two, an intelligent planet-busting bomb dispatched by Ostar, a world where dogs rule and humans fetch sticks, speculates why its predecessor, Mark One, failed to explode and eliminate the planet as ordered. The Ostar, you see, are so distracted by human pop music that they're practically unable to think. Just as George figures out where the missing money went, two aliens appear and shoot him. Curious about the snippets of Ostar computer code (1,000 years more advanced than human code) embedded in Lucy's programs, the Mark Two-unfortunately, it's clueless about humans-whips up an inconspicuous probe, the human-shaped Mark Twain, who's so weird and geeky he's immediately accepted as a programmer by George's bank. Lucy, however, isn't as easily convinced. While eventually linking all this together, Holt's wicked blasts range far beyond bankers and programmers. What's missing here-and what his often estimable work has always lacked-is a compelling theme, like Discworld or Hitchhiker's Guide. Tons of wonderful confetti, but the flashbulbs don't pop.The Barnes & Noble Review
Tom Holt -- popular British author of dozens of novels, yet suffering from an undeservedly low profile in the USA -- owns a generous supply of all the talents needed to produce superb comedic fiction:
A capacious word-hoard full of strikingly outrageous metaphors and similes. ("For her, it was more like falling out of a window with a burst appendix and really bad toothache: there were three distinct ingredients, all urgent, all unsettling, all clamoring for her attention at the same time.")
A keen sense of the absurd.
A musician's sense of timing.
A dogged willingness to wring every last ounce of humor out of a conceit.
An ability to craft lovable, nebbishy Everymen and wicked, outsized villains, each exhibiting a full blend of vices and virtues.
A shameless enthusiasm for low pratfalls and puns.
A sophisticated command of arcane tidbits of fascinating information.
And when you factor in his admirable insider's grasp of science fiction and fantasy tropes, and a capacity to produce some genuine speculative insights, you get a fellow who can write rings around a mere Douglas Adams. In fact, one might measure his power in magnitudes of Sheckleys or Tenns.
Holt's latest, Blonde Bombshell, blends elements of Men in Black, John Carpenter's Dark Star, and even Lilo and Stitch to attain a frenzied carnival of comic chaos.
The highly advanced planet of Ostar is populated by genius canines, a race of doggie Stephen Frys. They have lately taken a dislike to Earth -- or Dirt, as they translate our name -- due to our annoying music broadcasts having finally reached across the lightyears to bewilder and bedevil them. They immediately dispatch one planet-busting missile to deal with us, but it vanishes from contact. Baffled, they launch a second, more cautiously. The intelligent bomb in orbit around Dirt sends down a manufactured spy in a human shell, who chooses the sly undercover name of Mark Twain. Twain's investigations eventually lead him to Lucy Pavlov, the world's smartest and richest woman, a female uber-Bill Gates. Figuring into the resulting machinations to stave off destruction of the planet are two rival Ostar spies, and George Stetchkin, alcoholic corporate lackey transmogrified into "a being of pure text" by the aliens.
Full of ingenious twists and reversals, this extremely silly story subverts its own farce with a clever examination of what being human means, and how different and opposed cultures might get along. Important and highly topical themes, whether you walk on two legs or four.
--Paul Di Filippo