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
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.
“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream- and rust-colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446591
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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