A worthy introduction to a captivating dystopian world.
In this SF debut, an employee gradually defies authority in a distant-future city that corporations own and artificial intelligence runs.
Kim purposefully leads a mundane life in an unnamed future city. Corporations like The Transportation Company and The Food Company have their hands in nearly everything, each with its own terms of service. AI systems not only assist in providing services, but also monitor citizens for any violations of the companies’ terms. Kim actually works at The Artificial Intelligence Company but not with any AI; she trains automatons that can’t think for themselves. As such, she pores over surveillance data in search of customers’ potential violations. It’s a tedious job but something she can easily do while she, as a customer herself, abides by all those terms of service. Even her recreation, from a baseball game to a beach party, is done in the manageable environment of virtual reality. But when Kim’s best friend from school, Shan, contacts her, the two go bicycling in the real world. The ride with Shan, who was something of a troublemaker in school, prompts a stockpile of citations from The Parks and Recreation Company and The Transportation Company. But something is off: The AI monitors seemingly let violations accumulate before notifying the cycling friends. Even stranger is Kim, who was convinced she’d lose her job, getting a promotion. Now, she’ll train an AI, conveniently named Kimberly, in “investigative techniques.” But as frequently malfunctioning Kimberly questions The Artificial Intelligence Company as well as the city’s governing Hierarchy, the AI’s possible self-awareness leads Kim to take a closer look at the totalitarian rules.
Stanfill offers a memorable but fairly light dystopia. Some of it is outright depressing; children, by the time they’re 4 years old, must leave the care of their “birth-giver” to live with a harsher “mentor.” But the story isn’t as dark as other SF outings. For example, there’s not much at stake; violating terms of service generates bans from certain activities or places or a hit to one’s social cohesion rating, which just leads to further citations. The author also sprinkles dry humor throughout, like days of the week known as oneday, twoday, etc. Kim is a sympathetic, tragic figure who staves off bouts of loneliness and misses the birth-giver she hardly remembers. Her narrative touches on a few SF staples, including an AI developing human qualities (for example, Kimberly’s envy of humanity’s free will) and VR becoming more real than reality itself. These bolster Kim’s slow but enthralling evolution, sparking a denouement that’s an unmistakable setup for a sequel. At the same time, there are hints of backstory left for a second installment to expand on, like the Turmoil and the AI war, which were apparently catastrophic. Stanfill adorns his prose with vivid descriptions, even when the protagonist dons a VR headset: “Kim dropped into VR at the beach and walked over to a shady spot in a grove of palm trees, where” her friend “Quinn was strumming away on a beat-up old guitar and singing....Kim was still listening when Shan came riding up on a rusty old bicycle, looking sad and forlorn.”
A worthy introduction to a captivating dystopian world.Pub Date: April 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63-877835-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Bad Rooster Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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