A high-density wrap-up of a diverting cyber-sci-fi trilogy.
As humanity succumbs to a vast mind-control conspiracy, Jake Travissi suspects that reality may no longer be on his side in the finale of Davison’s (State of Union, 2102, etc.) God Head Trilogy.
This third installment doesn’t hold back, opening with nothing less than the nuclear destruction of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Islamic fundamentalists are practically the last holdouts against the Consortium, a mid-21st-century conspiracy of techno-elites out to implant civilization with Internet-linked computer chips. The Chip enhances physiology and perception and instantly connects people with the rest of mankind—but it also means that the Consortium can “hack” them and turn them into mindless slaves, exile them to a sham reality (à la The Matrix) or even order them to die. Jake, an LA lawman with a strong sense of right and wrong, relentlessly battles the Consortium to the point of allying with religious terrorists. The villains find him a source of fascination because he alone managed to resist and override his Chip programming early on. Now, a nanotech-based virus is seeding Chips worldwide into people and animals. Jake, along with a few fellow resistance fighters, flees to the only untainted realm left: the independent colonies on the moon. There, he aims to fully activate his Chip for a last stand against the Consortium’s ultimate cyberweapon—a ruthless, sadistic artificial intelligence named Constantine, who controls billions of human minds simultaneously. As our hero survives one narrow-escape cliffhanger after another, he begins to wonder if can he trust his reality at all—or if his experiences are creations of Consortium puppet masters. A story that began as a cyberpunk police thriller has, across three volumes, zoomed out to become a mind blower of Olaf Stapledon–esque dimensions, ruminating on robot ethics, futurism, and what it means to be human and have free will. (Davison even manages to express the Consortium’s point of view in a disquietingly attractive manner.) Action fans, meanwhile, will find a body count in the billions. As long as readers don’t mind this final installment’s deus-ex-machina conclusion (in a very literal sense), they’ll certainly appreciate its uncommonly forceful grand-canvas sci-fi storytelling.
A high-density wrap-up of a diverting cyber-sci-fi trilogy.Pub Date: April 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0985552862
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Bedouin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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