Celebratory, speculative SF that brims with positive transhumanistic reassurance.
In Armstrong’s SF novel, a cutting-edge neuroscientist promotes the migration of human consciousness to digital technology, despite opposition from conspiracy theorists and the possibility of alien intervention.
The author, a science writer who previously published At Any Cost: A Guide to The Transhumanist Wager and the Ideas of Zoltan Istvan(2021), envisions a near-future in which a celebrity scientist, Swati Mohan Shinneman, is at the forefront of the transhumanist movement. It involves the dream of transferring consciousness into advanced robot bodies or into computer memory to exist as pure, sentient data, offering potential immortality. Swati is a charismatic, upbeat, attractive, brilliant Indian woman in a life-partnership with Juliet, a trans woman; together with their associates at the Institute for Applied Cybernetics, they start a program to turn Swati into “SynthSwati,” a mind uploaded into a synthetic body. However, they face opposition from LuddAnon, an anti-transhumanism group. Swati, taking the high road, offers defectors from the cultish LuddAnon sanctuary and brain-rehabilitation. Her colleagues also create ludicrous, fake LuddAnon online posts accusing space aliens of being behind the transhumanist wave, in order to discredit the naysayers. Swati, who has a brain implant that allows her to go online into the Omnistream (the next-generation web), encounters a mass of information there that reveals that all human minds are secretly, unknowingly linked in a sort of super-consciousness—the design of powerful extraterrestrial entities who seeded Earth with life 3.5 billion years ago. The ETs are still extant, and their emissary arrives in the form of Aminata, a genetically engineered, immortal Ghanaian woman who has secretly guided and mentored many of Earth’s geniuses, including Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Pierre and Marie Curie. Meanwhile, Swati confronts the LuddAnons and tries to convince the public to ascend to the next level of evolution.
Armstrong’s narrative, which largely consists of dialogue, is mostly staged around multimedia presentations, press events, and vast mass-audience demos; as such, it feels less like a fictional story and more like a transcription of an epic infomercial for transhumanism—one in which the giddy, science-struck characters usher in an epochal leap ahead for the human species. Many soliloquies explain to gathered listeners (and readers) that being transferred to a machine body is not a pulp-SF nightmare but a joyful, voluntary shedding of murderous aggression, greed, competition, jealousy, self-hatred, religion, and other causes of human suffering. Hive-mind cyborgs won’t attempt to take over the world, according to this scheme, simply because their values will be logically attuned to the betterment of society. All of this is largely couched in disarming prose in which profundity alternates with flip pop-culture references, cheery colloquialisms (“See ya lata, mashed potata”), puns, and citations of great thinkers from the Rev. Martin Luther King and SF master Arthur C. Clarke to satirical novelist Douglas Adams and martial-arts legend Bruce Lee. Readers may also note that Swati and her fellow forward-thinkers are almost all women; the one major male character is the leader of LuddAnon. Naturally, such enmity doesn’t stand a chance.
Celebratory, speculative SF that brims with positive transhumanistic reassurance.Pub Date: April 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781735339122
Page Count: 338
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2024
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
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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