Polished environmentalist SF whose occasionally New Age-y trappings don’t detract from the thrills and wonder.
In debut author Jeffrey’s SF series starter, war is brewing as a corporate space explorer makes extraordinary discoveries on a newly discovered, Earth-like planet.
By the year 2217, Earthings have discovered “voidoids,” invisible space structures of unknown nature; entering one voidoid means instant transportation to another, light-years away. As a result, humanity, which is spread between an ecologically ravaged Earth and a colonized Mars, has attained the capability of miraculous interstellar travel. But nobody knows how or why voidoids function, and nobody has found a planet capable of supporting life—until humans discover Silvanus, a pristine, paradiselike world. Aiden Macallan is a planetary geologist for Earth’s ruthless and powerful Terra Corp, even though the same capitalist entity likely murdered his mother, a workers’ rights advocate, and had him temporarily imprisoned. He evaluates worlds in the voidoid system for mineral exploitation and other profitable benefits. He and his team on the survey ship Argo speed towards Silvanus to stake a legal claim; the potential for colonies has set the global government of the United Earth Domain against the rival Allied Republics of Mars, which may result in war. Aiden and his trusty artificial-intelligence companion, Hutton, find Silvanus to be an astounding place—and one that’s under the threat of extinction. Veteran SF readers may hear echoes of Stanislaw Lem’s classic Solaris(1961), filtered through familiar climate change angst as Jeffrey details the ruin of Amazon rainforests and the predatory greed of corporations that still deny the existence of global warming. Some of the themes of Duneauthor Frank Herbert are also discernable; much of the plot turns on the Gaia hypothesis of planetary biology as a single, vast, living entity, which is the basis of a somewhat cloistered religion. The moralizing seldom slows the story’s brisk, urgent pacing, although the its atypical structure allows it to reach an action-packed climax on the edge of the third act; nearly everything afterward feels like epilogue. The author, who’s also a jazz musician, lovingly insinuates John Coltrane as a surprise key to first-contact communication.
Polished environmentalist SF whose occasionally New Age-y trappings don’t detract from the thrills and wonder.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2020
ISBN: 9780998674247
Page Count: 442
Publisher: JeffreyJazz Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Likely the most silly-fun you can have with star-crossed lovers fighting the absurdity of an unjust world.
A young couple in the near future dares to lift the curtain on their hierarchical society, which segregates its population based on the colors they can—and can’t—see.
Though it’s been 15 years since Fforde published Shades of Grey (2009), this long-awaited sequel picks up right where things left off. Eddie Russett, a high-seeing Red, is still new to the fringe town of East Carmine, and his infatuation with daredevil Jane Grey, recently dubbed Jane Brunswick for her ability to see a small percentage of Green, is expanding his horizons in more ways than one. While society sees their fraternization as illegal—“It was one of the crueller Rules….If you were on the opposite side of the colour wheel, you’d be compelled to be on nodding terms for the rest of your lives”—Jane has encouraged Eddie not to care. And while it’s ingrained in Eddie to believe that if you question the Colourtocracy, you could die for it, he hasn’t caught the Mildew—the “disease” that suspiciously takes people when they are no longer useful to society—just yet. If he and Jane can bend one rule and survive, what else is not as black-and-white as it seems? If all this has you thinking of West Side Story and its inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, you’re bang on. Puns and references to the world as we know it are numerous, direct, and often absurdly funny, à la Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Fforde expertly interlaces the most serious existential discussions with humor, favoring fun over drama—a most notable, laugh-out-loud example being the consultation of the Parker Brothers’ RISK Map to explore the possibility of there being a Somewhere Else. While this is generally a refreshing spin on the life-after-apocalypse genre, it hasn’t escaped a mild case of middle-book syndrome. The hyperfixation on dismantling the corrupt Colourtocracy makes the plot feel more formulaic as it builds toward the big revelation, undoubtedly setting up the final act.
Likely the most silly-fun you can have with star-crossed lovers fighting the absurdity of an unjust world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781641296281
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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