A compelling, time-scrambled SF take on nuclear angst.
In Powell’s SF novel, a family is caught in a tangled web of destiny as climate change and nuclear war threaten Earth.
The story opens in the dreary dystopia of 2068. What remains of the former USA is now an impoverished and splintered occupied territory divided by China and a resurgent communist Russia; global warming, economic devastation, and AI technology have decimated North America. Teenager Willow Krist, subsisting in the miserable “Middle Eastern District of Cameriko, Western Province of the New Soviet Republic,” knows her late grandfather, William, is blamed for the atomic terrorism and sabotage that left the country stripped of nuclear warheads and defenseless against its insidious occupiers. But the truth hides under layers of social media disinformation, propaganda, and censorship. For a school assignment, she endeavors to uncover the facts, aided by a family cache of papers and legacy media. Willow discovers that William in the 2020s was a rather jaded entrepreneur behind an encryption system that safeguarded launch routines for America’s massive nuclear arsenal; something went wrong, and an accidental global holocaust occurred in 2026. Or did it? Readers learn that in 1809, a Franciscan missionary in South America tremulously transcribed the “Orange Book” from the words of a member of the Indigenous Mapuche tribe. This mystical manuscript teaches disciples to mentally project their consciousness back through time and affect events, creating opportunities to rewrite history. The book has passed in and out of the Krist family, and William, with a small band of trusted associates, tried to use the text to avert the devastation that lay ahead. The narrative is an intriguing mosaic of first-person journal entries, blog posts, bulletins, transcriptions, and ephemera; the stream-of-consciousness, bitter-rant style of the William Krist passages is bracing in the short term but grows rather wearisome in large doses. Powell proffers cause/effect intrigues and paradoxes that will transfix readers acquainted with time-travel SF, but the thematic focus is on nuclear war horror, alongside sobering considerations of climate change, toxic American politics (there’s a mercifully brief appearance by a female Donald Trump stand-in, a right-wing elitist anti-immigrant cretin), and injustice.
A compelling, time-scrambled SF take on nuclear angst.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798891387331
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Subplot
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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