Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S.

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. Further, although each of the two previous volumes was complete in itself there is an organic relationship among the three that cannot be realized without Ged's final, mighty 'Be thou made whole' and his drawing of the Rune of Ending.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 magnificent effort Ged closes the door Cob has opened between the worlds, restoring Cob to easeful death and thereby restoring a healing balance to the world: As adventure narrative this lacks the concrete tensions of its predecessors, but once more the themes - centering here on the 'unmeasured desire for life' and its misapplications - are deeply embedded in the action (though far from peculiar to the imagined kingdom of Earthsea). Finally, guided by dragons to the land of the dead (the 'farthest shore') Ged and Arren find the source of evil - a non-dead, nonliving shadow of a mage named Cob, whose greed for power and immortality has upset the vital equilibrium of life and death.

Accompanied by a young prince named Arren (predestined King of a united Earthsea), he finds town after town destroyed by fear, greed and the false comfort of drugs. In the third of the Earthsea volumes Sparrowhawk-Ged, now archmage at Roke, undertakes a long sea odyssey in search of the vague evil that is drying up true magic throughout the islands.

The farthest shore le guin