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
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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