December 30, 1996
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.
December 1, 1996
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.
November 1, 1996
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. ((Reviewed November 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)
July 1, 2022
DEBUT In this near-future dystopian thriller, the assassination of a popular Black president by a white extremist leads to rioting, civil war, and economic collapse, followed by disease and famine. Leon Crane, a former NASA scientist but now a drifter without a home, hears a voice in his head. It's a clarion call to purpose--go to Chicago and rescue a medical researcher who might have discovered the cure to much of what ails the world. Lakota medicine man Jacob Fire Cloud and young orphaned Amy Ladue also heed the call. They come together on an epic journey across a war-ravaged country to save the future. The shifting focus of the story on different characters allows the reader to experience the dying country even as the fight is on to save something from its ashes. This reissue of the 1997 post-apocalyptic thriller by Reading Rainbow's Burton proves many of his predictions eerily close to coming true in the intervening years. VERDICT This will be popular with fans of Burton's acting and readers who like their dystopian novels to end on a slightly hopeful note.--Marlene Harris
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