A complex, timely, and engaging dystopian tale.
Lopez presents an unsparing critique of artificial-intelligence-driven efficiency in this speculative novel.
This debut novel imagines an AI-overrun state in the mid-21st century and the impact of its policies on researcher Natasha Morgan and her childhood friend Catalina Restrepo. For the residents of Meadowbrook, technological changes that initially seem relatively benign rapidly devolve into unrelenting coercion. Catalina learns this lesson the hard way after the state threatens to cut off her income credits for what they characterize as overuse of a NeuroSphere device that she uses to help her communicate with Manny, her son with autism. Natasha faces her own difficulties after her research is essentially hijacked as part of mission to harvest human consciousnesses from talented individuals for AI purposes—the titular mandate of the novel. When Prime Minister Julian Vale voices concern over the project’s ethical implications, his assistant tersely reminds him, “Progress demands sacrifice.” It’s a high-stakes tale that offers a timely spin on the familiar dystopian scenarios of such works as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, and Catalina and Natasha face increasingly hard choices. Readers may wonder how far off such a reality is, in light of well-established command and control mechanisms that already exist, such as social-credit systems—and the answer may surprise them, as the author suggests in this novel. However, it makes for some dense reading, at times, and characters disappear for extended stretches only to reappear at unexpected moments; one of these figures is Daniel Mercer, a local football hero whose mantra (“Confidence is armor”) proves tragically inadequate for coping with the demands of the AI known as the Prime Aion Node, and its ravenous appetite for control (“I observe everything”); such moments will stick with readers as much as the politics or tech talk. Overall, Lopez shows himself to be a skilled, confident storyteller, and where he goes from here will be intriguing to watch.
A complex, timely, and engaging dystopian tale.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798231509140
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Strange Attraction Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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