A complex work that offers an intense look at a possible future.
An ambitious SF novel about climate change and technology addiction.
In 2039 Japan, Yoshi Goto is starting a new job as a shopping mall Santa Claus. Two years ago, he was the lead in the highly anticipated film One Man Dreaming, but he was so difficult to work with that the Santa gig is the only one he can get to prove that he’s reliable. After accidentally knocking down a child and crashing the sleigh into a Christmas tree, Yoshi is not only fired on the spot—he’s also facing a potential lawsuit. As he walks home in the rain, a driverless “smart car” pulls alongside him with an automated message telling him that the CEO of Maya Technologies, Tyler Gray, wants to meet with him. Gray is going to use his new technology, the Maya Lenz, to create an immersive virtual environment where people can relive their favorite parts of movies, enjoy role-playing games, and more. One of the main features of the new Maya District is that it will feature the main character from One Man Dreaming. All Yoshi has to do is spend a few weeks acting like his character, so that Maya’s computers can learn how to be like him. But as Yoshi explores the outside world with and without his new Lenz, he discovers that there’s more to the city, and the people in it, than he ever imagined. Lutz (Amanojaku, 2016, etc.) has created a compelling future world that’s not very much unlike our own. The effects of climate change, for example, are shown to be very real, causing massive changes to Japan’s coastlines, and its citizens are clearly hiding behind technology to escape this terrible reality. The only way in which the book falls a bit flat is in how it focuses on the worldbuilding—and on cool new gadgets—to such an extent that it takes too long to get to the heart of the story. At times, so much is thrown at readers that it may be difficult for them to care enough about particular characters or plot points that prove important later.
A complex work that offers an intense look at a possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9946275-5-1
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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