A quick, vivid tale about faulty future medical science and rampant female ambition.
In this SF debut, a 23rd-century corporation that cryogenically freezes thousands of people for hopeful resurrection is covering up the fact that the process has gone terribly wrong.
Cory’s novella-length tale is offered in three “Acts” and set in 2279, 20 years after a third World War has left the planet in even more chaos than before. Sharp divisions exist between the rich and poor, and countless climate change refugees clog the few functional nations. For two centuries, a family-run London corporation called Life Beyond (established in 2055) has been clinically freezing the ailing or dying with the cryogenic promise of thawing them out and reviving them in the future when medical miracles will be able to cure their conditions. Now, the populist demand goes out from America to revive a frozen messiah-figure president who really knew how to curb refugees, the legendary Carlson Tomp, whose superwealthy dynasty still wields much power and influence. The top people at Life Beyond—still able to afford private lodgings in a city choked with the homeless and disabled war survivors—are Alison Greshwood, the CEO, who pulled the firm out of the ruin brought on by her wastrel father, and Lucy, the young, contentious head of research, who fancies that resurrecting Tomp will be her key to riches and fame. (Alison’s heroic efforts did not prevent her from being jilted at the marriage altar and generally having a miserable life.) But the sticking point is that Life Beyond has never actually brought any of its multitudinous clients out of high-tech hibernation pods successfully. Alison is one of the few who know that the science on which the company is based is fundamentally flawed, with some rather horrific side effects. There’s not a wasted word in this engaging material, which is mildly satiric in tone with a sense of Christian admonition in the wings for its dystopic setting. The express-train narrative’s chapter titles are verses taken from the book of Genesis. Alison ruefully runs through the Ten Commandments to examine where she went off the rails. The intriguing finale is a cliffhanger, potentially opening the subzero-vault door for a sequel. And, to paraphrase Seth Grahame-Smith’s famous Jane Austen novel, yes, dear reader, there are zombies.
A quick, vivid tale about faulty future medical science and rampant female ambition. (acknowledgements)Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-64-586321-0
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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