A first novel that sacrifices a serious consideration of eugenics and the price of progress to the greedy demands of a...
Futuristic flourishes deck out a down-and-dirty story of a murderous conspiracy that roils an elite boarding school and its brainwashed students.
The year is 2036. Gyromobiles have largely replaced automobiles. They cruise the skies above San Angeles, a city created to handle California’s population explosion. In the desert, a massive tower thrusts skyward. This is Stansbury School, home to 4,000 students (known as specimens), ages 6 through 18, most destined for Ivy League schools. They exist on an elaborate med cycle that stimulates intellectual and physical growth while suppressing sexual and aggressive urges. A lethally armed security force controls “unbalanced” specimens. Foremost among these is Cooley, a rebellious orphan on scholarship who won’t take his pills. His adversary is another scholarship orphan, Goldsmith, unpopular valedictorian and steely enforcer of the rules who yearns for friends. Might a crisis cause the two to bond? Yes indeed. Five Stansbury graduates, unbalanced ex-specimens, have been brutally murdered in San Angeles. Cooley stumbles onto the scene of the sixth serial killing and is set up as the perpetrator, but then his nemesis Goldsmith uncharacteristically breaks the rules and visits the San Angeles murder scene. He realizes he and Cooley are both pawns, and eventually discovers the killings are linked to an imminent Senate vote in Washington that would bestow a trillion dollars annually on Stansbury. The novel spins out of control as murder reaches the school’s executive suites. In comic-book heroics involving laser syringes and heat-seeking ThermaGuns, the orphans hold off Security long enough to allow a former valedictorian, despite her “deep, red, and wet” wounds, to simulcast damning testimony to the Senate committee.
A first novel that sacrifices a serious consideration of eugenics and the price of progress to the greedy demands of a tangled plot.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34096-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
It’s understandable that Tor chose to make The Cassini Division, this Scottish writer’s splendidly direct, uncluttered, and action-packed third novel, into MacLeod’s 1999 US debut (p. 840); but it’s also annoying—inasmuch as The Stone Canal (his second novel, UK publication 1996) is a direct precursor. Dave Reid and Jon Wilde meet at Glasgow University in the 1970s, and their fates entwine: They become friends, political foes, rivals for the same woman’s affections, and movers and shakers in a 21st-century world of fragmented, polarized societies and incessant wars. Wilde, eventually shot dead (he blames Reid), reawakens 50 years later—death is no longer permanent—in a robot body in space. Bossed by Reid, Jon and others are building a universe-spanning wormhole near Jupiter—but they’re slaves of the “macros,” agglomerations of computerized post-human mentalities living thousands of times faster than ordinary humans. Fortunately, the macros soon destroy themselves, though some survive on Jupiter. In the second narrative strand, four centuries hence, Reid is gangster-in-chief of distant, capitalist-anarchist New Mars. Robot Jay Dub (Wilde, still in his hardware body) clones a copy of his own flesh then liberates Reid’s computer/android sex-slave, Dee Model, whose body is a clone of Wilde’s wife—thus precipitating a struggle between abolitionists (freedom for intelligent machines!) and Reid’s status quo. Another wonderfully knotty, inventive, intelligent yarn, if top-heavy with political minutiae that even dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles will have a hard time deciphering.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-87053-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
A novella from Marvel Comics co-founder Lee and writer Peter David packaged with 12 new stories (from other writers) that follow the amazing web-slinger from his humble high-school beginnings to his contemporary crises of purpose. With one exception, these stories utterly miss the point and fail to translate the richness of the old comic panels to straight print. It was the combination of existential indecision, vigilante self-loathing, and killer art that always distinguished the Spider-Man comics. This was especially true of the comics that appeared in the 1970s, when the brooding Spider-Man's adventures were cast in a grim New York City, in whose angular shadows the character confronted his own demons along with a passel of criminal nasties and the disdain of the authorities. Threats from within matched the danger outside, and often Spidey looked like he might drift into psychosis. But this anthology seems determined to paint a revised, sanitized portrait of the wall-crawler. Only Ann Nocenti's twisted tale of organ thieves and genetic horrors (``Blindspot'') successfully conveys the dark side of Spider-Man as she enters the area between classical ethics and pop ambiguities that shows the web-slinger at his most complex. Other tales are stiffer: Spidey teaches a young boy a lesson about responsibility (Lawrence Watt-Evans's ``Cool''); Spidey races to keep Dr. Curt Conners, a Jekyll-and-Hyde character whose bad side is the Lizard, from snuffing out his family (Christopher Golden's ``Radically Both''); Spidey swings to Brooklyn, carrying a liver transplant for a little girl (Robert L. Washington III's ``Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Courier''). Other tales provide the supporting cast: Peter Parker's angelic Aunt May; his suffering girlfriends (Gwen, Mary Jane); his grouchy Daily Bugle editor, J. Jonah Jameson; and some of the more notable villains, including Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Mysterio, and Venom. Shows all too clearly why comics are comics and books are books. (16 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-425-14610-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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