Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.
In Eadington’s speculative novel, a former National Guardsman traumatized by politically motivated violence and civil conflict learns his memories may be deceptive implants.
The story begins in 2048, in the aftermath of several years (a period called “the Lapse”) of right-wing violence and reactionary terrorism perpetrated by fundamentalist Christian militias and anti-immigrant “patriots” that tore the United States apart. Pete Bascom is a former National Guardsman in California who is traumatized by physical and psychological wounds and works in a government department devoted to victim Redress and Reparations as society recovers. Suddenly, however, the program is discontinued, leaving Pete without a cause until he overhears another ex-Guardsman’s boasts about his past; the man’s history is identical to Bascom’s. Pete is forced to consider the possibility that his memories are not his own, but rather some kind of advanced neural transplant that has successfully repressed his origins. He learns that he may actually be Jacob Leiter, an unsavory character of the bygone era who was hip-deep in the realms of pornography, sex work, and political extremism. Every thread the hero follows on his private inquest deeper into California’s ugly underground leads to more stonewalling and evasion (even by those closest to him, like a part-time lover), and there are threats from especially menacing characters warning him to leave things from the bad old days alone. The Philip K. Dick-like premise of scrambled identity in a futurescape of disquiet and deceit is effectively rendered in an arid, noirish fashion that may remind readers of the classic film Chinatown (the use of the name “Jake” and the ways in which the West Coast water supply figures into the plot further cement the comparison). As in Dick’s work, absolute truth and full closure elude the protagonist; via scraps and oblique references, readers get a fragmentary picture of the fateful 21st-century awfulness between red and blue states (“I can call the mid-30s what they were. People were shooting each other, bombing each other. Chrissakes, thousands of people died in the Battle of Akron. That’s a war”).
Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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