A freewheeling, thoughtful work of cyberpunk with a political edge.
The leader of a private army suffers a crisis of identity in Marco’s debut SF novel.
In the future, climate change runs unchecked, society is enthralled by a virtual reality system called Intratopia, and people upset with the government hire “Stick-it-to-the-man” robots to protest on their behalf. Eris is the commander of the Proxy, a private, non-ideological security force employed by the American president, Humbert, to prop up his unpopular administration. Eris has grown tired of being a killer-for-hire, however. “How much longer are we willing to sell our skillsets to the highest bidder?” she asks her officers. “How much longer will we play proxy to another nation’s conflicts? Until we die? Is this our great calling in life? To be…glorified hitmen?” She’s interested in self-determination, or at least independent statehood for the organization’s territory, Proximus Landus (previously known as Delaware, before it sank beneath—and then was reclaimed from—the ocean). Eris’ officers think she’s nuts. Their credo, and the credo of the Proxy at large, is to stay neutral and keep cashing checks. Eris’ personal crisis is exacerbated by the intrusion of two entities (who aren’t ghosts, precisely, but who don’t appear to be altogether “real,” either) who begin appearing at inopportune times. Rainbow Dancer is a frolicsome blonde woman who wears bright colors and keeps referring to Eris as “Harmonia.” Faceless Phantom wears a hood that obscures her identity and exposes Eris to nightmarish imagery. What do they want from her? And how do they fit into the larger intrigues of America’s collapsing political system? Eris will have to find out (about the strange beings and a lot of other covert happenings) to learn whether her purpose leads toward independence, neutrality, or a new kind of engagement with a world that seems hellbent on disengaging with reality.
Marco writes with unfettered imagination, creating a future America that, while outlandishly dystopian, manages to feel like an unsettlingly plausible outcome. Much of the action takes place in the wonderfully named New Fine City, a fully automated metropolis that has become a slum and whose operating system has been hacked to speak with the voice of a 1960s radio DJ. Eris laments about how the city has become too respectable under the control of the nation’s leading anarchist organization: “Ever since Shift Society took control of NFC, they’ve defined what’s morally acceptable and—rumor has it—shot all the pedophiles. I guess anarchists have moral thresholds. Now, it’s a more risqué Vegas.” The book’s subtitle bills the work as absurdist, but this is slightly misleading; the novel is satirical and sometimes cerebral, but it operates within the normal parameters of politically tinged SF. As is often the case with speculative novels, it takes the reader a while to get oriented within the vast invented world, but when this hurdle is cleared the political and technological machinations prove quite engaging. While the characters are not psychologically realistic—Eris, in particular, is hard to pin down from a motivational standpoint—they are big and intriguing in a way that keeps things fun.
A freewheeling, thoughtful work of cyberpunk with a political edge.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2023
ISBN: 979-8989390502
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Entropy
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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