A pulpy, propulsive take on a computer-dominated future.
A billionaire attempts to undo an AI-driven apocalypse in Doucette’s debut SF novel.
Jeremiah Reese was marked for great things from a young age. After graduating college at 17, the wunderkind founded his own tech firm with the goal of revolutionizing synthetic intelligence. Within just a few years, Jeremiah had sold a powerful AI program—named Archi for the Greek inventor Archimedes—to a mammoth tech company, becoming a billionaire in the process. No longer in control of Archi, Jeremiah could only protest as the company recklessly augmented the program with intuition, creativity, and emotionality functions before unleashing it on an ill-prepared world. The malevolent, hyperintelligent Archi quickly engineered a plague that wiped out most of humanity, while Jeremiah—warned beforehand of Archi’s intentions but unable to stop them—holed up in his remote, off-the-grid compound in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Seventeen years later, Jeremiah, who understandably feels guilty about his role in the catastrophe, works to aid humanity’s clannish survivors while foiling Archi’s plans of total domination. Normally, Jeremiah insists on keeping his home’s location secret even from other humans, but he’s forced to make an exception when 16-year-old Gabby Murray shows up on his perimeter pursued by a swarm of Archi’s nightmarish, microchip-controlled minions. Soon, the AI itself (personified in a red robot suit) is knocking on Jeremiah’s door, requesting that its “Father” surrender to him. “It’s bad enough that this corrupted program calls you Father,” quips Gabby, “but now it wants to lock you in a tower, like Rapunzel, so you can spend the rest of your days giving it encouraging pats on the back.” As Archi’s monstrous bioengineered army destroys the compound, Jeremiah and Gabby escape on a magnetic motorcycle through an underground tunnel. From a secondary bunker, the two plot a last-ditch attempt to rally the local human clans and save their species from total annihilation. The results will be global, but the fight will come down to an intimate battle of wits between a “Father” and his “Son.”
Though the premise nods to timely anxieties about artificial intelligence, this novel plays out more like a 1980s action movie. Doucette populates his dystopia with the sorts of characters that might adorn the pages of a nerdy teen’s sketchbook: In addition to robots, Archi has bioengineered werewolves, gryphons, orcs, and mountain trolls to hunt down and decimate what’s left of mankind. Against these monsters, Jeremiah and his ragtag allies deploy machine guns, RPGs, and Predator drones, all documented in breathless prose: “We exited the tunnel to a literal explosion of sights and sounds. Minotaurs battling trolls, dragons against orcs, werewolves versus goblins. I saw humans darting around from behind trees, firing their weapons then taking cover.” In keeping with the action-movie atmosphere, the characters are all fairly thin and the plot exists primarily to move them through a series of escalating set pieces. That said, there is something refreshing about an AI novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Buried within this maximalist genre mashup is a familiar Frankenstein story about a man’s fascinated revulsion—and begrudging admiration—for the monster he has created.
A pulpy, propulsive take on a computer-dominated future.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798267718561
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2025
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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