A thought-provoking SF tale recalling the heady works of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick.
In Rozental’s dystopic novel, one man descends into madness—or possibly finds transcendence—as he struggles to distinguish between reality, hallucinations, and AI virtual worlds.
Set in a near future in which Venice and other coastal cities are underwater, Paris has been incinerated in a nuclear blast, and surviving cities like Moscow are plagued by permanent rolling blackouts, the vast majority of humanity finds escape in the Flow, a virtual-reality simulation of the world that’s powered by users’ subconscious desires. The story follows Nikolai Vasilyev, who’s a shadow of the man he used to be. Once a renowned actor, he’s now a down-and-out alcoholic struggling to come to grips with the death of his wife, who died years earlier. Essentially begging for some vegetables and a bottle of vodka at a store in an impoverished Moscow neighborhood, Nikolai agrees to deliver a gift (a wooden case containing two glass beakers filled with a transparent liquid) to the store proprietor’s cousin. But the simple deed goes awry as Nikolai questions whether he’s hallucinating, institutionalized in a mental hospital, stuck inside the Flow, or a spy in a secret program run by an AI research institute. With what might be the spirit of his dead wife leading him through a surreal dreamscape, Nikolai finally discovers the mind-blowing truth. Powered by an unreliable narrator and set in an all-too-plausible future inhabited by zombified VR users who have lost touch with the real world, the mind-bending narrative works so well in large part because of the author’s utterly compelling prose style. Rozental’s use of darkly lyrical imagery throughout is an undeniable strength: Old apple trees loom in the darkness as “huge spiders,” a woman’s wrinkled hands and crooked fingers resemble “the branches of a rain-starved tree,” and a white church melts into the darkness “like a lump of sugar in a cup of hot coffee.”
A thought-provoking SF tale recalling the heady works of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick.Pub Date: July 19, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 24, 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
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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