A highly entertaining and absorbing combination of philosophy and action featuring robustly individualized characters.
In this sci-fi novel, factions fight for survival and dominance generations after humans lost control of artificial intelligence.
In the near future, Axel Gillian becomes the security director for a rich, powerful corporation that has uncovered an enormous potential threat: open-source, artificial intelligence software that could become powerful enough to compete with and destroy humanity itself. Axel’s mission is to shut it down before this happens. Several generations later, what was once the United States is now divided into two realms, the Spoke lands and the Essentialist territory, lying roughly on either side of the Shenandoah Valley. To the west, Essentialists have more land and a numerical advantage over the Spokes; they view all technology with deep distrust for causing the calamitous Detonation. To the east, the Spokes are squeezed between the Essentialists and the eastern shore, which is overrun with disease and bandits. The Spokes’ comfort with machinery gives them more effective equipment, but both cultures must avoid using pre-Detonation electronics, which attracts retchers—birdlike creatures that vomit device-destroying acid. Expanding population pressures increase the conflict between the two sides, which are each beset by internal political and philosophical struggles. Among the many well-developed characters, key figures include Flora Clearwater, an Essentialist who joins a prisoner-exchange mission to the Spoke lands and has a secret agenda. Among the Spokes, young Owen of Seeville (once known as Charlottesville) joins an expedition to retrieve equipment from one of many “bike towers”: cylindrical warehouses each housing about 20,000 bicycles; this mission, too, has a secret objective. He winds up in Yorktown, which is led by elderly Madison Banks, formerly a Lord of Seeville. She’s among the “New Founders” who value democracy, and when she hears what’s going on in Seeville, she decides it’s time to go back. Meanwhile, an exciting, tense Essentialist-versus-Spoke showdown brews that will eventually pit one artificial intelligence against another and reveal Axel’s long-ago plan to protect the future. Otto (A Toxic Ambition, 2012) weaves together the many strands of this complicated, thoughtful, and exciting novel with great skill. He makes full use of the book’s sprawling length to present vivid characters and a future world that vibrates with conflicts and ideas. The story builds to bigger, increasingly exciting scenes of tension, battle, and violence, but Otto never forgets his characters’ humanity. The various subcultures get intriguing suggestions of richness, as when the cannibalistic leader of the Allegheny people wears “a lattice of bones cascading down her back, each one laced together by strands of her raggedy hair” and warns captors that she’ll “add your bones to my staircase.” Although many post-apocalyptic novels give readers landmarks that are recognizable from the modern world, Otto also introduces more mysterious elements, such as the aforementioned bike towers and colossal statues whose purposes are unimaginable. But these elements don’t merely baffle—they also provide real payoffs. In addition, Otto’s reflections on hubris and warnings about artificial intelligence have a chilling plausibility.
A highly entertaining and absorbing combination of philosophy and action featuring robustly individualized characters.Pub Date: March 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-06119-0
Page Count: 632
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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