A thought-provoking, if occasionally unwieldy, exploration of agency in an age of corporate control.
In the near future, two lawyers battle over a company’s rights to own memories in Shulman’s speculative novel.
A company named Cortx—“an industry leader at the forefront of neurotech and nootropic research and development”—has recently unveiled new cinema technology that embeds films directly into memory. However, cinemagoers incur ongoing charges for storing these film memories. Memory-rights activists challenge Cortx’s practices in court; suave and self-confident defense lawyer Ken Marshall represents Cortx while the resolutely un-suave Gil Hinchliff, who suffers from chronic nightmares and hallucinations, leads the case for the Memory Rights Alliance. As the trial moves forward, the narrative cuts between the present and past, following Gil and the early rise of the MRA in response to an increasingly memory-centric culture. The narrative’s scope continues to widen as the story develops, with new characters quickly introduced and soon discarded. The author, a BAFTA and TV Academy Award-winning documentary producer and director, labels his chapters “Scenes,” and they often read like sketches for a screenplay, each described with vivid imagery intended to be visualized and structured with the novelistic equivalent of quick cuts. The cross-cutting between past and present, with such a large cast, is suited for cinema storytelling but can be a touch difficult to follow in a novel. The story ultimately centers around a love triangle, corporate espionage, and regular philosophical discussions about the meaning of memory. Gil calls several philosophers to the stand to testify, including Oxford Professor Abidemi Okafor, who suggests that memories “live and breathe, get buried, transmute, become distorted, or exaggerated, or forgotten,” and that solidifying them might strip away crucial aspects of identity. It is in these debates about the nature of memory that the novel truly springs to life.
A thought-provoking, if occasionally unwieldy, exploration of agency in an age of corporate control.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798350918830
Page Count: 286
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
