Impressive at the core. Readers who relished the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy will certainly enjoy this one.
From the author of The Stone in the Skull (2017, etc.), the first of a space opera trilogy featuring gabby pirates, a giant intelligent mantis, and a narcoleptic cat.
The galaxy is governed by the multispecies Synarche, though we’re told little of how it operates. Operating on the economic fringes are engineer Haimey Dz, her partner, pilot Connla Kuruscz, and their spaceship/AI, Singer, who make a living by locating and exploiting space wrecks. Their latest acquisition, horrifyingly, turns out to be the murdered remains of a vast, ancient spacegoing alien. Human pirates have stripped the corpse of its advanced technology, but after investigating, Haimey finds she’s acquired a nonsentient parasite that occupies her skin and confers strange new abilities to sense and manipulate gravity fields and navigate in hyperspace. This, we’ll eventually learn, is part of an elaborate piratical scheme to force Haimey to face the past she’s suppressed and divulge a secret she doesn’t know she knows, resulting in a confrontation between Haimey and sociopathic pirate Zanya Farweather—clearly the intent all along. Their opposing views on just about everything form the centerpiece of an extended debate contrasting immature and irrational human sociopolitical mores with, ultimately, the mature, reasoned forbearance displayed by powerful aliens. Bear, then, offers plenty of big, bold, fascinating ideas in a narrative that culminates in a double showdown with a dazzling array of said thoughtful beings, but to get us there the plot has to wheel through highly improbable convolutions. The main characters—MacGyver-ish Haimey with her angst-y self-censorship, absurdly dull Connla, a chirpy know-it-all AI that natters on about politics—annoy more often than they appeal. The whole package contrasts somewhat unfavorably with Bear’s fantasy works, where the characters realistically inhabit fanciful landscapes and stories grows organically from their interactions with it and each other.
Impressive at the core. Readers who relished the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy will certainly enjoy this one.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-0298-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
The narrator is researching for his book, The Day the World Ended, when he comes up against his karass, as he later understands it through Bokononism. It leads him to investigate Dr. Hoenniker, "Father of the A-Bomb," whom his son Little Newt says was playing cat's cradle when the bomb dropped (people weren't his specialty). The good doctor left his children an even greater weapon of devastation in ice-nine, an inheritance which won his ugly daughter a handsome husband; little Newt, a Russian midget just his size for an affair that ended when she absconded with a sliver of ice-nine; and made unlikely Franklin the right hand man of Papa Monzano of San Lorenzo, a make-believe Caribbean republic. On the trail of ice-nine, the narrator comes in for Papa's death and is tapped for the Presidency of San Lorenzo. Lured by sex symbol Mona, he accepts, but before he can take office, ice-nine breaks loose, freezing land and sea. Bokonon, the aged existentialist residing in the jungle as counter to the strong man, formulates a religion that makes up for life altogether: since the natives are miserable and there is little hope for changing their lot, he takes advantage of the release of ice-nine to bring them a happy death. The narrator's karass is at last made clear by Bokonon himself, leaving him to commit a final blasphemy against whoever is up there. A riddle on the meaning of meaninglessness or vice versa in a devastation-oriented era, with science-fiction figures on the prowl and political-ologies lanced. Spottily effective.
Pub Date: March 18, 1963
ISBN: 038533348X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.
The relationship between a young debtor and the trillionaire who owns him serves as a parable for the ills of capitalism.
Debut novelist Szpara imagines an only slightly more dystopian United States than the one that exists today, in which the wealth gap has grown so large that the country is more or less split into trillionaires and debtors. Debtors inherit their family's debt, increasing it exponentially over time. To pay it off, many sign up to become slaves for a predetermined amount of time, with the “choice” to inject a drug called Dociline that turns them into a kind of blissful zombie who has no memory, pain, or agency for the duration of their term. The drug is supposed to wear off within two weeks, but when Elisha Wilder’s mother returned from her debt-paying term, it never did, leaving her docile indefinitely. To resolve the rest of his family’s debt, Elisha becomes a Docile to none other than Alex Bishop, the CEO of the company that manufactures Dociline. He invokes his right to refuse the drug, one of the only Dociles ever to do so. Alex enacts a horrifying period of brainwashing in order to modify Elisha’s behavior to mimic that of an “on-med.” The resulting relationship between them is disturbing. As Alex wakes up to his complicity in a broken system—“I am Dr. Frankenstein and I’ve fallen in love with my own monster”—he becomes more sympathetic, for better or worse. As Elisha suffers not only brainwashing, rape, and abuse, but the recovery that must come after, his love for—fixation with, dependence on—Alex poses interesting questions about consent: “Being my own person hurts too much….Why should an opportunity hurt so much?” However, despite excellent pacing and a gripping narrative, Szpara fails to address the history of slavery in America—a history that is race-based and continues to shape the nation. This is a story with fully realized queer characters that is unafraid to ask complicated questions; as a parable, it functions well. But without addressing this important aspect of the nation and economic structures within which it takes place, it cannot succeed in its takedown of oppressive systems.
An engrossing and fast-paced read that doesn’t hit the mark it aims for.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21615-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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