A laser-focused, irresistible lampoon of woke culture.
A debut SF satire targets runaway political correctness.
Fabler’s novel opens in 2056 in a world where the fad of social media “woke” posturing and censorship has metamorphosed into a strict political order. Jordan McPhee, “once a mathematics professor, father, and sometime lover of women, apolitical and ambitious only for a life of modern academic achievement,” has been “deplatformed” by the cancel-culture mob that objected to his profession. This has cost him almost everything in this post-Overthrow world where Social Equity Regulations govern all. When he attends the Lineal Progression, formerly known as a christening, of his daughter Lexie’s child, he’s afraid even to hug her (“Accusation was guilt; every middle-aged white male knew that,” he thinks. “Comforting a child—even a grown-up one—was an exclusively female privilege, and the wisdom of that stricture was no longer questioned”). At the ceremony, he meets Alexa Smythe, formerly a brilliant master's degree student in his department. Later, the public inciter Artie Sharp helps to create a viral video that instantly makes Alexa an unwilling emblem of resistance to the Social Justice agenda of the World Government. The author wades into all of this with gusto and a good deal of sharp-tongued eloquence. When Alexa tells a pal that all she was trying to do was get people to be kind to one another, the friend responds: “Good luck with that one. You know what Nietzsche says about kindness, and Foucault has completely deconstructed it.” Like all first-rate satire, this book lets most of its subjects’ own real-world excesses do the heavy lifting. Fabler’s scorn is exquisitely controlled, and a great many of his jokes land. All but the most hypercensorious readers who spend far too much time online will find the results hilarious.
A laser-focused, irresistible lampoon of woke culture.Pub Date: July 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-473-58414-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Wild and Lawless Limited
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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