A smashing, energetic installment in this futuristic series that keeps getting better.
An ex–office worker, banished to a treacherous apartment district, fights to survive thugs and a rogue artificial intelligence in this SF sequel.
Kim once worked at the Artificial Intelligence Company in an AI–run dystopian city. But after drones caught her making loveto a woman named Shan,she was branded a criminal in a future world that rejects any kind of individuality. The punishment was exile in one of the crime-ridden outer districts. Her new apartment and assigned manual-labor job aren’t great, and Kim has never before lived without constant AI assistance or a bot brewing her coffee. She isn’t in District 33 for long before danger tracks her down: A couple of hooligans accost her and continually threaten her in later run-ins. They seem to know too much about her, which makes Kim suspect that someone—or something—is pointing them in her direction. The telltale buzzing sound of a drone overhead indicates it’s likely Kimberly, the AI that Kim created for her old company and that’s since turned against her. Luckily, Kim makes some new friends and scores a side gig as a “pedicabbie,” at which the skilled bicyclist excels. Things take a significant turn when she agrees to a pickup in the elite District 2 and a drop-off somewhere on “the outside”—the ungoverned land just beyond reinforced concrete walls. This ultimately precipitates Kim’s deep dive into virtual reality, which she frequented in her old life. There, she may find a way to fix Kimberly and take a stance against her former employer and the authoritarian Hierarchy.
Stanfill delivers a faster-paced follow-up to series opener Terms of Service(2021)—one in which Kim’s fight briskly moves back and forth between real life and VR. The protagonist also faces more urgent predicaments than she did in the first novel. She’s determined to find Shan, who’s now hiding as a “Blank,” having successfully ditched her ID chip with Kim’s assistance. Moreover, the perpetually hostile thugs keep popping up, and some in Kim’s group of allies think that she may be a traitor. Despite Kim’s reliance on AIs, she manages to roll with life’s punches and adjust to her new circumstances with relative ease. She doesn’t want to kill anyone, but she won’t hesitate to flash her switchblade to ward off a threat. Meanwhile, a fascinating cast surrounds her. Their local language, Panglobal, doesn’t recognize gender, so this “translated” narrative uses only she/her/hers for all characters. Stanfill, as in his earlier book, animates the pages with lucid details, as when Kim visits a nightclub (in the real world): “Spins, lunges, leaps, surges, all the usual moves but stronger, more intense, more vital. She danced as if all the devils of Hell were nipping at her heels. She had nothing left to lose, no future, no past, only the present.” Scenes in VR, however, are equally vibrant all the way until the tale’s ending, which offers surprising resolution.
A smashing, energetic installment in this futuristic series that keeps getting better.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9781638778370
Page Count: 402
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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