A visionary SF novel that captures the emotional toll of our imperfect, tech-reliant world.
Two traders get more than they bargained for on a trip into the wasteland in Cooke’s dystopian SF novel.
Jane lives in the city of Chiru on a planet orbiting two suns—one real and dying, the other artificial and on the fritz. Like everyone else in Chiru, her body is regulated by her chonin, the government-provided AI microchip embedded in her wrist that’s supposed to make life easier (though really, like the artificial sun, it is prone to malfunction). Chonins are Jane’s business at the moment: She and her partner, Parker West, have been hired to transport a load of them to the remote Outer Territories—a dangerous but potentially lucrative job. “Jane’s considerable debt had grown over the years and this was one of the few ways to earn some additional credits during the long and nasty recessionary period,” the narrator states matter-of-factly. “Parker would follow Jane anywhere but he was growing worried about the whole venture.” With a robot named TennTenn, the couple sets out onto the rugged terrain hoping for a big score. Deep in the wastes they meet Arum Bell, an inventor with a complicated past, and Jane begins to learn things about her world—and herself—that she never could have imagined. Cooke’s vivid prose renders the novel’s otherworldly landscapes in glittering detail: “The surface of the true sun cast a projection of highly energized particles outward. The sand around them darkened. Electrifying blues, greens and violets dressed up the naked sky in a different type of light seldom seen within the decontaminated area.” The characters are all fairly stock, but the author manages to make the world of Chiru and the Outer Territories feel fresh. The book’s greatest pleasure is the way the SF flourishes blend with its western plot to form a wonderfully melancholic bit of climate fiction. This is one apocalypse the reader won’t want to see end.
A visionary SF novel that captures the emotional toll of our imperfect, tech-reliant world.Pub Date: June 16, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.
In a dystopian near future, art battles back against fear.
Ng’s first two novels—her arresting debut, Everything I Never Told You (2014), and devastating follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—provided an insightful, empathetic perspective on America as it is. Her equally sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn latest effort, set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust by the government and their neighbors, offers a frightening portrait of what it might become. The novel’s young protagonist, Bird, was 9 when his mother—without explanation—left him and his father; his father destroyed every sign of her. Now, when Bird is 12, a letter arrives. Because it is addressed to “Bird,” he knows it's from his mother. For three years, he has had to answer to his given name, Noah; repeat that he and his father no longer have anything to do with his mother; try not to attract attention; and endure classmates calling his mother a traitor. None of it makes sense to Bird until his one friend, Sadie, fills him in: His mother, the child of Chinese immigrants, wrote a poem that had improbably become a rallying cry for those protesting PACT—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act—a law that had helped end the Crisis 10 years before, ushering in an era in which violent economic protests had become vanishingly rare, but fear and suspicion, especially for persons of Asian origin, reigned. One of the Pillars of PACT—“Protects children from environments espousing harmful views”—had been the pretext for Sadie’s removal from her parents, who had sought to expose PACT’s cruelties and, Bird begins to understand, had prompted his own mother’s decision to leave. His mother's letter launches him on an odyssey to locate her, to listen and to learn. From the very first page of this thoroughly engrossing and deeply moving novel, Bird’s story takes wing. Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love.
Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49254-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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