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Big Egg
West of the Earth, the showdown begins.
Mars Sheriff Genesis Torrez faces one question every day: is this planet big enough for two colonies? With one populated by nigh-incomprehensible and occasionally violent alien creatures, there’s no easy answer.
When a catastrophic horror threatens the settlers with annihilation, Genesis must turn to her team of mecha riders to prepare for the showdown.
Author Raffael Coronelli (Daikaiju Yuki) and illustrator Alex Gayhart (All Your Ruins) invite you to ride out with the Slinger squad into the red desert to meet what terrors have hatched from the BIG EGG.
Mars Sheriff Genesis Torrez faces one question every day: is this planet big enough for two colonies? With one populated by nigh-incomprehensible and occasionally violent alien creatures, there’s no easy answer.
When a catastrophic horror threatens the settlers with annihilation, Genesis must turn to her team of mecha riders to prepare for the showdown.
Author Raffael Coronelli (Daikaiju Yuki) and illustrator Alex Gayhart (All Your Ruins) invite you to ride out with the Slinger squad into the red desert to meet what terrors have hatched from the BIG EGG.
309 pages, Paperback
Published April 2, 2019
2 people are currently reading
5 people want to read
About the author
Raffael Coronelli
23 books15 followersRaffael Coronelli is a Chicago-based world adventurer and writer. His works include the How to Have an Adventure in… travel book series, several novels, and essays for Anime News Network and blu-ray releases from Arrow Video.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 24, 2019
I need to sleep/think about this before I rate
Review to come on scifiandscary.com
Review to come on scifiandscary.com
March 21, 2019
"It hates."
Big Egg is the first non-kaiju novel by author Raffael Coronelli. But fans of his kaiju works will find a lot of overlap in terms of themes and content. One of the things I'm frequently struck by in Coronelli's work is the author's belief (or a desire to believe) in a diverse group of people being accepting and doing the right thing in the end. For the kaiju novels, I made the comparison to famed Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, who repeatedly showed all of mankind coming together to defeat a common threat to the planet. With Big Egg, we still get that sense of hope, but there's an added underlying current of dread as well. Something wicked this way comes. And though it's never spelled out as a good vs. evil sort of novel, that's ultimately what this is; good people coming together to face a force of unknown evil.
In the sci-fi novel, we follow a small group of people who are stationed on a Mars colony. They share Mars with strange alien beings that we don't get along with. A violent mishap leads to even more strained relations with the Mars humans and aliens, but that soon takes a backseat to the happenings of Earth... The planet Earth, our homeworld, explodes into a million pieces and from the cracking planet comes forth a 'hatchling' of enormous size. It's an evil, hateful being that has birthed itself from the planet like a chick cracking its egg. And now this bouncing baby is on its way to Mars, looking to cause more destruction. The last remaining humans must try to mend fences with their Mars alien neighbors, while also questioning if the aliens had anything to do with the space giant, in an attempt to survive its coming arrival.
It's like Coronelli took a look at the space baby from 2001: A Space Odyssey and said, 'what if this guy was as big as a planet and a bit of an asshole?' and then let it go wild. The author also plays with some 'western in space' ideas as the chief law enforcement officer on Mars tries to rally her troops and unite a colony against a coming threat. But it's the hatchling that's my favorite thing about the book. Just looking in its eyes puts bad ideas in people's heads. It's an evil, hateful creature that defies reason -- and I found the driving ideas behind it truly unsettling in many chapters.
Big Egg is full of big new ideas. From the mech action, to alien colonists, to the giant evil space monsters, fans of science fiction will find a lot to like. In addition to the genre content, Big Egg offers some thoughts on tolerance, mental health, and getting to know another culture in order to improve a shared society. It's incredibly fun, while also sporting a dark side that keeps things from feeling too safe. Big Egg rates as my favorite Coronelli book so far. #Yeehaw
Big Egg is the first non-kaiju novel by author Raffael Coronelli. But fans of his kaiju works will find a lot of overlap in terms of themes and content. One of the things I'm frequently struck by in Coronelli's work is the author's belief (or a desire to believe) in a diverse group of people being accepting and doing the right thing in the end. For the kaiju novels, I made the comparison to famed Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, who repeatedly showed all of mankind coming together to defeat a common threat to the planet. With Big Egg, we still get that sense of hope, but there's an added underlying current of dread as well. Something wicked this way comes. And though it's never spelled out as a good vs. evil sort of novel, that's ultimately what this is; good people coming together to face a force of unknown evil.
In the sci-fi novel, we follow a small group of people who are stationed on a Mars colony. They share Mars with strange alien beings that we don't get along with. A violent mishap leads to even more strained relations with the Mars humans and aliens, but that soon takes a backseat to the happenings of Earth... The planet Earth, our homeworld, explodes into a million pieces and from the cracking planet comes forth a 'hatchling' of enormous size. It's an evil, hateful being that has birthed itself from the planet like a chick cracking its egg. And now this bouncing baby is on its way to Mars, looking to cause more destruction. The last remaining humans must try to mend fences with their Mars alien neighbors, while also questioning if the aliens had anything to do with the space giant, in an attempt to survive its coming arrival.
It's like Coronelli took a look at the space baby from 2001: A Space Odyssey and said, 'what if this guy was as big as a planet and a bit of an asshole?' and then let it go wild. The author also plays with some 'western in space' ideas as the chief law enforcement officer on Mars tries to rally her troops and unite a colony against a coming threat. But it's the hatchling that's my favorite thing about the book. Just looking in its eyes puts bad ideas in people's heads. It's an evil, hateful creature that defies reason -- and I found the driving ideas behind it truly unsettling in many chapters.
Big Egg is full of big new ideas. From the mech action, to alien colonists, to the giant evil space monsters, fans of science fiction will find a lot to like. In addition to the genre content, Big Egg offers some thoughts on tolerance, mental health, and getting to know another culture in order to improve a shared society. It's incredibly fun, while also sporting a dark side that keeps things from feeling too safe. Big Egg rates as my favorite Coronelli book so far. #Yeehaw
December 4, 2022
Everyone has challenges, some as small waking up in the morning, others as large as the threat of planetary annihilation. Big Egg runs the gambit of these, and it’s a remarkable ride for it.
Set on Mars in the distant future, a group of pilots for the law-keeping Slinger Squad find their already stressful work dialed up to 11. The threat, which I will avoid spoiling, is so interesting because it manages to terrorize our heroes and bystanders on both cosmic and personal scales. It allows a concept that could otherwise seem too big in scope to infect the characters and the reader with personal stakes and tribulations that, despite the cosmic setting, are as relatable as anything else.
There’s a pulp sensibility here, and it’s a keen mixture of matter-of-fact and balls to the wall weird that jives in such a specific way that it’s hard to not be drawn in. The world is big here, but we see it in glimpses, Coronelli never indulges himself, instead using it in the most careful of ways. It’s kind of a remarkable thing to read with a concept like this, because it seems like it’d be very easy to go overboard. Instead there’s a fine kind of equilibrium maintained with world-building and cultural and mythic touchstones to send the reader off through the novel at a brisk pace.
There are, let’s say, non-human entities at play and they’re beautiful in their variety and distinction. Alienation is a theme here, as are several dozen other issues that come with the human condition, and each interaction between human and human or human and alien, or even humankind with existential notions, are all explored in a natural way.
The message of the thing is that there are things, great and terrible, that hatch forth from our day to day but we can rise above them. We can do it ourselves, with loved ones, with help from neighbors, but no matter how grim or how far from your touchstones you may feel, there is always a chance for hope.
Set on Mars in the distant future, a group of pilots for the law-keeping Slinger Squad find their already stressful work dialed up to 11. The threat, which I will avoid spoiling, is so interesting because it manages to terrorize our heroes and bystanders on both cosmic and personal scales. It allows a concept that could otherwise seem too big in scope to infect the characters and the reader with personal stakes and tribulations that, despite the cosmic setting, are as relatable as anything else.
There’s a pulp sensibility here, and it’s a keen mixture of matter-of-fact and balls to the wall weird that jives in such a specific way that it’s hard to not be drawn in. The world is big here, but we see it in glimpses, Coronelli never indulges himself, instead using it in the most careful of ways. It’s kind of a remarkable thing to read with a concept like this, because it seems like it’d be very easy to go overboard. Instead there’s a fine kind of equilibrium maintained with world-building and cultural and mythic touchstones to send the reader off through the novel at a brisk pace.
There are, let’s say, non-human entities at play and they’re beautiful in their variety and distinction. Alienation is a theme here, as are several dozen other issues that come with the human condition, and each interaction between human and human or human and alien, or even humankind with existential notions, are all explored in a natural way.
The message of the thing is that there are things, great and terrible, that hatch forth from our day to day but we can rise above them. We can do it ourselves, with loved ones, with help from neighbors, but no matter how grim or how far from your touchstones you may feel, there is always a chance for hope.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews