If you thought Immortality was powerful, just wait until you read the sequel.
The fate of humanity may be worse than death in this involving conclusion to Bohacz’s (Immortality, 2007) two-part techno-thriller. Two years have passed since the events of Immortality, when nanotech-plague kill zones reduced the population of the world to a slight fraction of what it had been. No natural disease, the plague was unleashed by the god-machine—an ancient, sentient network housed in supercolonies across the globe—whose inscrutable calculations showed it was to the benefit of Earth for the human population to be pruned back. Although the time of kill zones ended as abruptly as it began, only a few people know the truth—and that truth is a liability the recovering governments cannot allow the public to hear. Dr. Kathy Morrison, a former scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who first studied the kill zones, now lives in a small settlement of scientists in Pueblo Canyon, Ariz., eking out an existence and hoping to stay beneath the government’s radar. The biologist Dr. Mark Freedman lives there, too, as well as former police officer Sarah Mayfair, one of the few to survive after being inside a kill zone. But Mark and Sarah are hybrids now, with the nanotech seeds of the god-machine steadily replacing their biology with nanotechnology, making them smarter, faster and active peripherals in the god-machine’s “n-web network,” the wireless neurological interface carried by bacteria into nearly all multicelled creatures on earth. Across the n-web, Mark and Sarah feel a pull—a “singularity,” as Mark calls it, “like a black hole…sucking in all the data from the n-web around it”—that they’re drawn to investigate. Mark and Sarah leave their refuge on a quest that takes them across the nation and toward a terrifying conclusion. The horrors of the plague, they realize, were only a harbinger of more disasters. Meanwhile, Kathy, fearing what her ex-patient, Sarah, and lover, Mark, were becoming, stays behind only to be discovered by “Peacekeeper” forces under the direction of Gen. McKafferty, a misguided patriot who holds these three responsible for the death of millions; he’ll stop at nothing to capture them. Blending fierce action, twisted conspiracies and bold “transhumanist” visions, Bohacz once again drives readers through a whirlwind in which even the characters aren’t sure if their thoughts are their own or if they were installed by the god-machine. Though the novel occasionally falters under the weighty exposition of its own ideas, Bohacz constantly raises the stakes, and the crisp dialogue and well-drawn characters keep the story barreling forward.
If you thought Immortality was powerful, just wait until you read the sequel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0979181535
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Mazel & Sechel
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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