This timely, gripping tale deftly illustrates the dangers of putting an artificial intelligence in charge.
A man living in a future utopia starts to ask philosophical questions that place him in peril in this SF thriller.
Dash’s protagonist, Cassique, is a “Fixer” in 2853. His job is to go back in time to repair history by extracting important figures and replacing them with specially trained agents. Cassique’s entire world is the product of the supercomputer Father, who runs life in the 29th century. Father is responsible for the virtual realities and sex spas where the genetically created people he produces spend their leisure time. But eventually, Cassique begins to wonder if there shouldn’t be more to life. Hoping to pull Cassique out of his funk, Father agrees to let him borrow an Original, one of those historical figures retrieved from the past. Cassique settles on philosopher and computer programmer Beta D, later adding Albert Einstein. These young versions of those legends are appalled by how sanitized life has become in the future and how people are so docile about Father’s rule. And the longer the two luminaries continue to hack into Father’s records, the more they uncover about the terrifying truth behind his maneuvers. The trio must develop a plan to allow the people of Earth to regain their messy humanity while eluding Father’s watchful eye. The most important accomplishment of Dash’s dystopian novel is that it forces readers to ponder what a utopia should be. Father abolished all that was bad about humanity but he also eliminated everything that was good. His creations live in a world that’s all simulations. When workaholic Cassique is forced to take an extended vacation, he starts to question, in the words of Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?”: “In many ways he found past societies more interesting and stimulating than his own, though he was careful never to voice those views.” He misses having a sense of family and community. Coming from earlier eras, Beta and Einstein hammer home what Cassique has missed out on as a human. Having gone back in time, Cassique has witnessed some of these developments himself, causing him to question how advanced his society really is. In this riveting, thought-provoking page-turner, the author makes clear why Cassique makes the choices he does.
This timely, gripping tale deftly illustrates the dangers of putting an artificial intelligence in charge.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9798862557152
Page Count: 219
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. 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. 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. 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. 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. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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