Philip K. Dick would be proud, in any event. You’ll never look at your Roomba the same way again.
Fun fact: According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, as of 2010 there were 8.6 million robots in the world. Fun scenario: They’re all out to kill us.
Forget Asimov’s laws of robotics; think of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator instead, or maybe that friendly-voiced if unblinking fellow in 2001. As editors Wilson and Adams observe, robots are scary because they're real, and the possibility of them rising up against us is—well, highly likely, since “[w]e live in a world teeming with monsters made real.” This anthology neatly explores that possibility, its contributors offering widely varying takes that share only the perspective that things don’t end well for Homo sapiens. The longest story, at a little more than 50 pages, is by Cory Doctorow, who matter-of-factly sets up a terrifying future: “Two hundred and fifteen years after Mary Shelley first started humanity’s hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr. Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring.” Not so the story that follows. Julianna Baggott, fresh from her latest post-apocalyptic fantasy, turns in a vision of a golden hour to come, “called the Golden Hour because the revolt was so massive and well-orchestrated that it is said that the humans fell within an hour.” (Interestingly, she offers the thought that robots can have parents.) The late John McCarthy—who died in 2011 of natural causes, not of robot agency, and who is considered the father of artificial intelligence—spins a tale that helps explain why robots should be ticked at us: “[R]obots were made somewhat fragile on the outside, so that if you kicked one, some parts would fall off.” The concept of the anthology is just right, and each of the 17 pieces addresses it well; extra points for greater diversity of all kinds than is evidenced by many other sci-fi collections, though it wouldn’t hurt to have a few better-known, more battle-tested authors (Eileen Gunn, say, or Samuel R. Delany) in the mix.
Philip K. Dick would be proud, in any event. You’ll never look at your Roomba the same way again.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80363-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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