A multitiered SF story cunningly rendered in nonchronological fashion.
McBee’s post-apocalyptic tale follows three separate timelines in this SF thriller.
In Kuridian, a bleak dystopian landscape of primitive settlements and suspicious rustics, a “gris-gris man” called Rance drifts from community to community dispensing mystical services and favors. He is not a shaman or hoodoo soothsayer but rather a long-lived holdover from the previous century, when vat-spawned people were infused with wonder-working nanotechnology—a necessity for survival and settling the harsh terrain of another planet. After an apocalyptic “Breakdown,” subsequent generations have largely forgotten these origins. Rance and scattered other “Watchers” like him try to revive the lost high-tech civilization, but it appears to be a futile struggle. In the same setting, a woman called Regaline tries to round up and train nano-gifted children who show signs of being able to control their latent nanite powers. But a conquest-minded city-state called Interland is also on the move, enslaving all such “casters” and weaponizing them as drone-soldiers for their invasions. In a third narrative thread (one with strong Philip K. Dick overtones), Kinney works for the giant HelixCom company on a nanotechnology base on an alien world, participating in terraforming the ecosystem for human life. He is sent by his shadowy superior to infiltrate a poorly run sister installation in search of possible espionage and sabotage, and he is met with hostility by new fellow employees, especially the beautiful Astrid Free. The three parts eventually tie together in a satisfying, if not entirely clear, sequence set in a milieu in which deep-space colonization requires long-range projections of “capsules containing payloads of programmable matter” and downloaded minds rather than the SF genre’s typical astronauts and colony ships. The unintended consequences are cleverly explored; nanotech becomes a sort of all-purpose magic, enabling wizardlike elemental combat and even something approximating vampirism (though this latter quality goes largely unexplored). The intricate, time-looping structure allows the author to drop numerous shocking reveals on the reader.
A multitiered SF story cunningly rendered in nonchronological fashion.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798891324664
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2026
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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