A truly unique protagonist fuels plenty of action and intrigue in this smart and twisty SF thriller.
When the creator of a powerful brain-implant technology is found murdered, a telepath is brought in to find answers in Fullilove’s SF novel.
The year is 2052 and brain-chip implants have become an unspoken requirement in society. Those made by NeuralStent are the best of the best…and only available to the wealthy. Jenny Sixa, a psychic whose “cruel talent” is the ability to see the last thoughts of murder victims in order to discover who killed them, encounters the most baffling case of her career when the LAPD’s Derrick Trent calls her in to discover who murdered NeuralStent’s founder, billionaire Ellen Pompeii. Sixa scorns NeuralStent’s inaccessibility to the nonwealthy people living in the “Zone,” which essentially forces them to gamble their lives with cheap knockoffs because “without chips, people can’t work, can’t compete in a society that demands the ability to access and manipulate information and equipment in a way that requires augmentation.” Still, she takes the case—but to her horror, Sixa quickly discovers that she can’t find anything in Pompeii’s final thoughts. The police rush to find someone to blame—in this case, a young man named Jamal Smith who had previously served time in jail—but Sixa isn’t convinced they have the right guy. As she and Trent dig deeper, they begin to peel back the layers of a dark underworld full of illegal chip augmentations, gluttonous investors, and a research discovery that might just bring down the entire brain-implant system. Meanwhile, bodies continue piling up—all of which have that odd blankness as their last memory that Sixa can’t crack—and Smith’s execution day looms as the investigative duo rapidly runs out of time.
Fullilove has crafted a thrilling futuristic tale that never shies away from taking aim at soulless corporations and their insatiable desire for profits: “A human life. Coin of the realm for the greedy and the merciless.” Some of the novel’s themes will likely prove familiar to those well versed in the SF canon; fans of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) will no doubt see some similarities in this largely dystopic world where humans with brain-chip implants have become vastly preferable to the “artificials” (androids) who had previously dominated the workforce and are now “engineered with limited life spans.” Some of the explanations of the brain-chip technology can become a bit long-winded, but Fullilove largely keeps the pace brisk with realistic dialogue and a keen balance between detective-type mystery and adrenaline-fueled action. The real standout, however, is Sixa herself. Whip-smart and utterly compelling, she proves over and over again to be a no-nonsense (and amusingly foul-mouthed) champion of the common people. Many readers will likely find her scathing remarks about the ability of privilege and wealth to buy some semblance of justice eerily relevant: “LAPD has got indifference down to a science, with an algorithm that calculates how fucked you are down to a decimal point…Not to mention the poor slobs in the Zone, because money can’t buy justice in the Zone, detective, it can only buy you scapegoats.” These themes of class, technology vs. morality, and social responsibility come appealingly wrapped in a fun and surprising futuristic odyssey.
A truly unique protagonist fuels plenty of action and intrigue in this smart and twisty SF thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798891324909
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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