This outsized so-called classic should have stayed in the past.
In this newly translated 1990 book from de Rojas, one of Cuba’s pre-eminent sci-fi writers, sleeper agents emerge from the past to wrest control of the future.
Two hundred years after the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, two tiny robots awaken underground and burrow to the surface. When 9-year-old Bennie touches one of the robots, it wipes out his personality and memories and replaces them with those of Thomas Babson, a sadistic Empire torturer who lived hundreds of years ago. Now awakened in the future, Babson injects agents’ identities into unsuspecting others. Bennie’s mother becomes Candy, a veteran spy, while psychosociologist Harry becomes Stephen, a man with desires so peculiar (though never described) that he reprograms women’s minds to suit his perverse needs. When Aisha arrives for an appointment with Harry, he hypnotizes her, and she awakens with the personality of Alice—plus Stephen’s additional, depraved sexual programming. Unbeknownst to the agents, Alice is also a spy for the Communists. She escapes from Stephen and the others and eventually teams up with Maya, a “cybo,” whose cybernetic implants have left her emotionless. Together, they forge a plan to take down the newly awakened operatives. Along the way, this bloated story crams in every moth-eaten sci-fi cliché readers can think of—romantic love is aberrant behavior, artificial intelligence gains sentience, people abandon technology to become “primitives”—and limps through them with zero urgency. The female characters are also depressingly retrograde; for example, Alice doesn’t seem to care that her sexual agency was brainwashed away and spends much of her time shrieking about her “love” for Stephen, often while naked or at least topless. Indeed, de Rojas describes virtually every female character’s bare breasts at least once: small breasts, pert breasts, prominent breasts—this book’s got more boobs than a Porky’s film. Meanwhile, the worldbuilding is glutted with details, with tiresome infodumps that go on for pages. Characters drift in and out of the story even as new players keep appearing. With everyone changing names and bodies, keeping track of who’s who becomes a chore.
This outsized so-called classic should have stayed in the past.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-632-06051-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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