An imaginative, whip-smart take on the way America pursues God through technology and electioneering.
A tech mogul vows to take everyone to heaven in spaceships if he’s elected president in Burns’ sardonic political sci-fi novel.
The author depicts a future America where rising seas have shrunk the U.S. to 41 states and necessitated the relocation of the White House to Denver. Politics, however, haven’t changed much, with the right-wing Federalist Party dominating the left-leaning Progressive Party and blaming climate change on immigrants and minorities while servicing the rich with tax cuts. Enter Swede Reid, holding a fortune of $852 billion from sales of his Consultant device—a small computer equipped with AI that knows everything and can impersonate anyone. (Swede’s device impersonates his dead father, Stanford.) Swede runs for the Federalist presidential nomination on a single promise: He will discover where heaven is (in deep space, he suspects) and take all of humankind there while delegating other duties to his vice president and cabinet officials. Party bosses are skeptical, but primary voters love Swede’s platform, artlessness, and refusal to demonize opponents, and he handily wins primaries and cruises to the nomination. The novel then changes focus to Swede’s Mauritanian research compound, where he and “Stanford,” along with 100 androids with Consultant brains impersonating religious and scientific thinkers from St. Augustine onward, try to figure out where heaven is and how to get there. They’re joined by Josh, an ordinary teenager whom Swede took on as a protégé; he has questions about the Last Testament Project and insistently points out that the superhuman Consultant robots could take over and dispense with actual humans. Swede’s hopes seem to pan out, however, when his experts pinpoint heaven’s location—a planet circling Polaris B, aka the North Star—and perfect a spaceship that can travel faster than the speed of light. But with ecological disasters looming, it’s still an urgent question whether humans can be ferried there before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Burns’ yarn wraps an electoral satire in an Isaac Asimov story with a Capra-esque hero and an O. Henry ending, all with the mordant, absurdist sensibility of Kurt Vonnegut. His slightly exaggerated send-up of American politics is shrewd and on-target in its skewering of the conservative mindset. (“This guy wants to use our resources to shuttle citizens of other countries to Heaven side by side with Americans,” fumes one Federalist operative. “How do you run for president in this day and age, especially as a Federalist, without hate?”) The novel also has a heavy philosophical element as Swede confers with his animatronic theologians on the nature of the soul and the possibility of an afterlife, conversations that come to no conclusive answers. Burns cuts the abstruse ruminations with plenty of sharply observed, evocative scenes of squalid social reality (Josh’s mom frets about his listless lifestyle: “Is there a clearer symptom of an addictive personality than the around-the-clock streaming?”). The result is a raucous and provocative diagnosis of our spiritual and ideological blight.
An imaginative, whip-smart take on the way America pursues God through technology and electioneering.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798273403987
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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