Overly cautious; needs juice.
West coast post-disaster yarn from first-time novelist Swavely.
Following a devastating earthquake, San Francisco’s police chief, Saul Rabin, formed a private corporation called the Bay Area Security Service and became the destroyed region’s de facto ruler. The rest of the U.S. has its own troubles and is happy for Rabin to rule with an iron fist and steer an independent course. The privileged few, including Rabin’s lieutenants, Darien Anthony, first-person narrator Michael Ares and Saul’s son, Paul, live in remote, heavily securitized enclaves. The only opposition is provided by ex-employee Harold Harris and his gadfly followers. Then, Paul tells Michael that Darien has been murdered; worse, in the car when the bomb exploded was Michael’s daughter. Lynn, Michael’s wife, falls apart as Michael leads the investigation, which goes nowhere. Then, Paul reveals that the murderer was—Michael! According to Paul, Saul had a microchip implanted in Michael’s head, which allows Saul to take control, which explains why Michael has no memory of the incident. But what could Saul’s motive be? Maybe it has something to do with the anti-gravity technology BASS has developed, by which means Saul is about to become a power player on the world stage. Unfortunately, Swavely offers few clues as to how this post-quake scenario developed—routine exposition in the middle of an action sequence doesn’t cut it—and no idea how the high-tech toys might work. For the rest, all the pieces link up, though the general affect is flat, and less patient readers might find themselves muttering, dude, loosen up!
Overly cautious; needs juice.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00149-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Liu’s trilogy is the first major work of science fiction to come to the West out of China, and it’s a masterpiece.
What if alien civilizations do exist? In this final installment of a stunning and provocative trilogy (The Dark Forest, 2015, etc.), Liu teases out the grim, unsettling implications.
Previously, astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji forestalled an invasion attempt by advanced aliens from planet Trisolaris. Luo’s “dark forest” deterrence works thus: if intelligent species exist, inevitably some will be hostile; therefore, safety lies in remaining hidden while threatening to reveal your enemy’s location to the predators. Earth knows where Trisolaris is, but the Trisolarans can’t threaten to reveal Earth’s location since they want to occupy it. Here, the story picks up at an earlier juncture. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer developing a probe to study the approaching Trisolaran fleet, learns that a friend has been tricked into volunteering to die in order to assist the project. Horrified, she retreats into hibernation. When she revives centuries later, dark forest deterrence holds the Trisolarans at bay. Luo, now old, hands Cheng the key to Earth’s defense. Unfortunately, the sophons—tiny, intelligent, light-speed computers sent by the Trisolarans as spies—know Cheng lacks Luo’s ruthlessness and immediately seize control of Earth; only by luck does Earth manage to trigger its deterrent. Hostile aliens immediately destroy planet Trisolaris, whose invasion fleet turns away because it’s only a matter of time before the same invisible antagonists deduce the existence of Earth and strike the solar system. Once again, Cheng must choose between logical ruthlessness and simple human compassion, with the fate of humanity at stake. This utterly absorbing book shows little interest in linear narrative or conventional character interactions. Instead, the author offers dilemmas moral, philosophical, and political; perspectives—a spectacular glimpse of three dimensions seen from a four-dimensional viewpoint; a dying universe shattered by billions of years of warfare; and persuasive ideas whose dismal repercussions extend beyond hope and despair into, inescapably, real-world significance.
Liu’s trilogy is the first major work of science fiction to come to the West out of China, and it’s a masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7710-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The body count is high, the gadgetry pure genius, the sex scenes deliriously overwrought, and the worn cynicism thoroughly...
A cyberwarrior from another planet is reborn on Earth to do a rich man’s bidding and is none too happy about it. Takeshi Kovacs is a hard-case kid from the colony-planet Harlan’s World (guess which two ethnic groups comprised the majority of its settlers) recently decommissioned from the Envoys—overtrained, amoral shock troops that enforce the laws of the galaxy laid down by the United Nations—and more recently turned to a life of crime. A police raid leaves him and his accomplice/girlfriend dead, but that’s not an immediate problem, since in the 25th century the dead are simply taken to clinics where their “stack” (a small metal tube embedded in the spine that contains a backup of their personality, memory, DNA, etc.) is then loaded into a new “sleeve,” or body. Resleeved and woken on Earth, Kovacs finds himself summoned to the Bay Area home of Laurens Bancroft, a filthy-rich member of the class known as “Meths” (for Methuselah) because they could afford to be continuously resleeved over the centuries. Bancroft thinks that when someone shot him in the head the other day and ruined that sleeve, somebody was trying to murder him, though the local cops think he was just trying to kill himself and doesn’t remember because his stack hadn’t been backed up yet. His only choice being to return to Harland’s World, Kovacs is sent off to find his new boss’s killer. The way ahead is quickly littered with the bodies of the unsavory types he comes across and with enough juicy future-detail to make any veteran SF scribe jealous.
The body count is high, the gadgetry pure genius, the sex scenes deliriously overwrought, and the worn cynicism thoroughly distasteful: a welcome return to cyberpunk’s badass roots.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45768-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
