An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect.
The so-called mother of all humans embarks on a millennia-spanning odyssey in Larson’s novel.
She calls herself Kikiloa, but she’s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in “the deep night of Africa’s great rift valley” some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, taking the form of a teenage girl with green eyes and impressively curly hair, which is how she appears to her friend Hazel and her brother, Lee, who are wholly unaware of her true identity until she mysteriously vanishes. When “Kiki” then reappears, it’s immediately clear to Hazel that there’s something a bit magical about her. In fact, Kiki begins to suspect that Hazel has an extraordinary destiny to fulfill, one that isn’t shared by the countless versions of herself who have lived and died in parallel worlds. But while Lee begins to fear that Kiki is deceiving her, Paha (Kiki’s mentor) has turned trickster, bent on sabotaging Hazel through violence. Kiki must uncover his true intentions while grappling with the reality that her own life—and the lives of all living things—must eventually end.
Larson’s debut reads a bit like Sarah Hall’s Helm crossed with Doctor Who, if the latter story were told from the Doctor’s perspective. Characters grapple with the implications of their own near immortality and the unhappy reality that sometimes a person must die to prevent a timeline from breaking. Like Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, Larson is one of a true minority of writers who can make cerebral science fiction both lucid and entertaining. The book’s relentlessly forward-moving style never once loses momentum in the course of its 400 pages. This feat is all the more impressive given the scope of the subjects under discussion, which include prehistory, the last Ice Age, multiverse theory, synchronicity, and the end of all things. “At this moment,” Kiki informs Hazel, “I am connected to a trillion mes across a trillion branches of the multiverse”—a flash of the sublime that reads like an ancient account of a deity disclosing itself to mortals. The book’s thematic roots in the teachings of Carl Jung offer a refreshingly unconventional message: that embracing the most frightening parts of ourselves is the path to wholeness. “When we accept shame,” says a “time surfer” named Akamai, “we become ourselves. We think the unthinkable thought…We face our fears and discover beyond them bare fields enriched by fire, ready for new growth.” This idea will be familiar to fans of Jung and Alan Watts, but it’s rare to see it articulated at all—let alone with such power—in a work of popular fiction. This philosophical depth anchors the multiverse shenanigans in a tangible, and very human, reality. An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798994982808
Page Count: 418
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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 unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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