Big aspirations get crammed into an engaging tale of a robot with a modest system.
A researcher, haunted by personal tragedy, becomes emotionally involved while psychologically assessing an advanced robot who may be prone to dangerous behavior.
Selbrede takes on weighty issues of humanity and machine life in this SF novella. For five years, research scientist Ally Fallows has worked at an institution called NQQ (short for the Latin nequaquam, meaning “any means”). Suddenly, she is reassigned to a project in NQQ’s elite division. A series of advanced prototype robots has gone rogue. Their AI minds suffer through “a sort of artificial puberty, if you will,” and they tend to rebelliously conclude their human creators are unworthy and must be eliminated. Thus, robots have been summarily destroyed by NQQ to thwart any threat to people (Ally later learns to her horror that human life has been lost already). Because of her psychology background, Ally is supposed to assess Makeshift, a guinea-pig robot deliberately cobbled from components of the scrapped ones just to trace the malfunction’s nature. Ally is surprised that the roughly humanoid Makeshift seems gentle, creative, and whimsical but also maddeningly obtuse and resistant to letting Ally analyze his intellect using standard methods. Eventually, the time with Makeshift—who, like Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, resists doing a task because of an existential crisis (except the robot does a better job of explaining himself)—triggers unhealed emotional wounds Ally carries about her dead brother. By adhering to a brief page count and a fairly unadorned narrative, Selbrede imparts a fablelike quality to material that might have been explored at greater breadth and depth in one of Isaac Asimov’s canonical robot tales, though Asimov (at least in shorter classics like “Liar!”) exhibits much less love for conflicted machines and the unattached women in white lab coats who tend them. This novella, meanwhile, wrestles with nothing short of the meaning of existence, altruism, and the purpose of all intelligent organisms—which potentially involves quite a bit of hard-drive space. A dose of ambiguity in the finale (literally, the last few sentences) raises whole memory banks full of questions, especially among readers who may relate Makeshift to the human-hating Archos R-14, the cybermenace in Daniel H. Wilson’s far more action-oriented robot-uprising series. Meanwhile, Selbrede’s appealing voice will work for a YA readership not expecting huge tech downloads or widescreen stunts.
Big aspirations get crammed into an engaging tale of a robot with a modest system.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-359-00957-2
Page Count: 62
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.
Brown is back with Book 4 of his Red Rising series (Morning Star, 2016, etc.) and explores familiar themes of rebellion, revenge, and political instability.
This novel examines the ramifications and pitfalls of trying to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. The events here take place 10 years after the conclusion of Morning Star, which ended on a seemingly positive note. Darrow, aka Reaper, and his lover, Virginia au Augustus, aka Mustang, had vanquished the Golds, the elite ruling class, so hope was held out that a new order would arise. But in the new book it becomes clear that the concept of political order is tenuous at best, for Darrow’s first thoughts are on the forces of violence and chaos he has unleashed: “famines and genocide...piracy...terrorism, radiation sickness and disease...and the one hundred million lives lost in my [nuclear] war.” Readers familiar with the previous trilogy—and you'll have to be if you want to understand the current novel—will welcome a familiar cast of characters, including Mustang, Sevro (Darrow’s friend and fellow warrior), and Lysander (grandson of the Sovereign). Readers will also find familiarity in Brown’s idiosyncratic naming system (Cassius au Bellona, Octavia au Lune) and even in his vocabulary for cursing (“Goryhell,” “Bloodydamn,” “Slag that”). Brown introduces a number of new characters, including 18-year-old Lyria, a survivor of the initial Rising who gives a fresh perspective on the violence of the new war—and violence is indeed never far away from the world Brown creates. (He includes one particularly gruesome gladiatorial combat between Cassius and a host of enemies.) Brown imparts an epic quality to the events in part by his use of names. It’s impossible to ignore the weighty connotations of characters when they sport names like Bellerephon, Diomedes, Dido, and Apollonius.
For those who like their science fiction dense, monumental, and a bit overwrought.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28591-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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