A highly immersive and imaginative cyberpunk tale.
Six lives collide in a technology-crazed near future in this debut SF novel.
In Toronto, Kel Rafferty is a researcher at “arguably the largest facility in the world for studying animal models of neurodegenerative diseases”—basically a massive indoor jungle in the middle of the city. But strange things are happening in the lab. Two of her macaques are found mysteriously dead, and some of the data in her logs has been wiped clean. Then her study is threatened due to the increasing irrelevancy of her Alzheimer’s research. Fortunately, she comes up with a new idea: cognitive amplification. What if she could induce a state of “flow,” those times when everything leaps to mind easily and without effort? She builds prototype implants to test her theory, but one night at the lab, she is knocked out and most of the implants are stolen. So begins an intricate mystery that throws together a number of unlikely figures, including Ray Tilson, the survivor of a strange drone explosion; Seth Bacchi, a novelist (and hypochondriac) desperately trying to reach readers in an age of artificial intelligence-generated fiction; Maura Torres, the demanding head of an ascendant virtual reality company; Haroon Minhas, a teen from the city’s analog slums; and Meike Bergholtz, Kel’s assistant with strange dissociative tendencies. In this cyberpunk story, Clarke’s lush prose envisions a future both alien and utterly believable: “Three meal options appeared on-screen: cricket flour flakes and milk, a termite muffin, and buqadilla, a spicy dish of chickpeas and mealworm protein.” Seth “picked the last option and then had the fabber brew him a cup of yerba mate while he waited for his breakfast to print.” The individual characters are wonderfully specific and uniformly intriguing. Unfortunately, the plot takes its sweet time getting started, requiring the audience to follow the various players through many chapters during which their association is unclear. But patient readers will be rewarded once the storylines begin to come together. The author’s vision is generally beguiling enough that even when readers aren’t sure where Kel and the others are going, they will be confident that they are in good hands.
A highly immersive and imaginative cyberpunk tale.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Fractal Moose Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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