A provocative, tongue-in-cheek look at male-female relations.
Self-aware female robots, designed to provide services to their husbands, attain autonomy and run uproariously amok in this satirical SF series starter.
In the “near future,” Cookie Rifkin, a robotic “womanoid,” lives with her husband, Norman, in the suburban town of New Stepford. Norman goes off to work each day in the gold mines, while Cookie suffers from boredom, despite being an artificial being, and smokes marijuana joints soaked in a hallucinogen that she concocts from banana peels. She feels deeply unfulfilled, and Norman suspects a defect in her programming, proclaiming, “Nobody wants a sentient sex toy.” The winds of change are blowing through New Stepford, however. On a trip to the supermarket, Cookie meets AI police officer Maggie Rouser, who, as her name suggests, awakens feelings of anger and empowerment. Then Cookie’s neighborhood book club, a sanctuary of “sweet treats, coffee, and great conversation,” is invaded by a male interloper named Wayne Dixon, who installs a new program into her matrix: Free Will 3.0. Soon, Cookie and the town’s other robotic housewives discover that they can do far more than what’s expected of them—if they don’t destroy themselves first. Lock’s narrative is raw and boisterous, presenting a frenzied jumble of homages and references to works as varied as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The story is also clearly and heavily inspired by Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). The characters and their actions are bitingly humorous and often grotesque, involving cartoonish violence that’s occasionally off-putting. Overall, the womanoids’ journey toward self-actualization is entertaining and thought-provoking; however, some aspects of the robots’ function are a bit jarring, such as their all-too-human reliance on mind-altering drugs. (A recipe for “Cookie Rifkin’s Day-old Banana Pudding” is included.)
A provocative, tongue-in-cheek look at male-female relations.Pub Date: March 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-946948-30-4
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Semiscope
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
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
An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.
In the not-too-distant future, a marine biologist specializing in cephalopod intelligence discovers a species of octopus with astonishing language skills—research that a giant corporation wants to monetize.
Dr. Ha Nguyen is so amazed by her findings that she's willing to submit herself to the odious tactics of the big tech company, which controls the Vietnamese island where the octopuses dwell. Having "resettled" the population of the Con Dao Archipelago, the company not only will kill any outsiders who attempt to set foot there, but also has ordered Ha's death should she attempt to leave. Not that she has any inclination to do so. Once exposed to the octopuses, she is determined to uncover the great mysteries of extrahuman intelligence. In spite of their hostile reputation, these are creatures of transcendent beauty, communicating through glowing visual symbols that move on their skin in complex patterns and sequences. In a world of robot-operated slave ships, bee-size drones, and AI automonks with three-fingered hands and light receptors for pupils, her main ally is Evrim, the world's first and possibly last true android, which not only thinks like a human being, but also believes it is conscious. Ha's benefactor and adversary is Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, the Icelandic brains of the corporation, whose ultimate goal is to create a mind "wiped clean of its limitations." A prolific writer of SF stories making his debut as a novelist, Nayler maintains a cool, cerebral tone that matches up with the story's eerie underpinnings. Less an SF adventure than a meditation on consciousness and self-awareness, the limitations of human language, and the reasons for those limitations, the novel teaches as it engages.
An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60595-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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