As immersive as it is impressive.
An addition to Douglas’ medium-future alien-warfare series (Singularity, 2012, etc.).
To get newcomers up to speed quickly and efficiently, and refresh the memories of series regulars, Douglas opens with a briefing paper from the Agletch, aliens willing to trade information for metals. The belligerent alien Sh’daar and their myriad client races, of whom the Agletch are one, have technology superior to Earth’s and seemingly intend to prevent human technology from progressing beyond the point the Sh’daar consider threatening. Now, a human research vessel has been destroyed under suspicious circumstances, and the Earth Confederation has sent a fleet to combat the presumed invaders. On Earth, meanwhile, former space Navy commander Alexander Koenig, now the newly re-elected president of North America, ponders how to implement his mandate—independence from the increasingly authoritarian and incompetent Earth Confederation. But as the space fleet engages the powerful Slan, another Sh’daar client race, the Confederation’s European faction launches a pre-emptive strike against North America and its most powerful ally, Konstantin, an artificial intelligence buried beneath a crater on the far side of the moon. As regulars might hope and expect, the action is full-blooded and almost nonstop, yet the well-developed background is surprisingly rich and logical. The Slan, for instance, far more than boilerplate weirdos with a few extra tentacles and eyestalks, are heavy-planet beings with radically different senses, motivations and psychology. Neither are the characters mere stock villains or heroes, but personalities with doubts and fears and hopes. Still, tension and excitement drive the narrative, and Douglas supplies them convincingly and relentlessly.
As immersive as it is impressive.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218380-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.
Comedy duo and YouTube superstars McLaughlin and Neal (Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality, 2017) craft a novel about things that go bump in the night.
Stranger Things carries a lot of cultural weight by itself these days—the legacy of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the many weird movies and books that don’t get the credit they deserve—but these comedy writers have hit that vein hard with this VHS-era kicker that references the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Kickboxer on the very first page. This is Bleak Creek, North Carolina, circa the early 1990s. We have three buddies, natch: Rex McClendon, whose dad owns a funeral home; his bestie, Lief Nelson; and their mutual crush, Alicia Boykins. They’re making PolterDog, an indie movie, because why not? Anyone who grew up in this era will be delighted by all the pop-culture references, from Goodfellas to Smokey and the Bandit. Of course, we need some reasonable adults around to help, too, so we get Janine Blitstein, a filmmaker just graduated from NYU film school, and her cousin Donna Lowe. Things get creepy in a hurry when Alicia is banished because of “bad behavior” to a local private school called Whitewood, founded in 1979. The big bad here is Wayne Whitewood, head of the school where every student is robbed of an identity and known only as “Candidatus”—Whitewood is the so-named “Keeper,” assisted by the Nurse Ratched–esque “Helper.” All the students are threatened at every turn by torture, most commonly “The Roll,” in which they’re confined in a carpet for days on end. Of course, there's a rescue mission, but because we’re in that Stephen King territory, there are also a bunch of supernatural threats, including a cursed spring and something known only as “The One Below.”
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-13-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.
A sequel to The Peripheral (2014), in which bored dilettantes from the future meddle virtually with potential pasts while more responsible people try to ameliorate the damage.
The novel opens, as so many Gibson novels do, with an intelligent, creative young woman accepting a not terribly well-defined job from an enigmatic (possibly sinister) executive involving a piece of cutting-edge technology. In this case, that technology is an emerging AI with origins in top-secret military research who calls herself Eunice. The young woman, Verity Jane, spends only a couple of days with Eunice (via company-issued glasses, phone, and headset) before her new boss, Gavin, gets nervous about Eunice’s potential and starts attempting to monitor every move of the human–AI pair. What Verity does not know is that her present day of 2017, in which a decreased Russian influence on social media led to an unnamed woman who is clearly Hillary Clinton winning the presidency, the U.K. voting to remain in the E.U., and a volatile situation in Turkey threatening to turn nuclear, was deliberately manipulated by someone in 2136 who enjoys creating doomsday scenarios among possible past timelines. It’s up to future law enforcement (who can only contact the timeline via digital communication or virtually controlled mechanical peripherals) to get in touch with Verity and Eunice and recruit them to prevent looming global catastrophe. Given Gibson’s Twitter-stated unhappiness with the timeline in which he currently finds himself, it's hard to know what he's implying here: That outside intervention would have been required to achieve a Hillary Clinton presidency and defeat Brexit? Or that our own vigilance on social media could/should have brought those outcomes about? And why would these two potentially positive occurrences in that timeline instigate an even darker scenario than the one readers are currently experiencing—and also require that intervention to fix it? Have we reached the point of no return in all potential 21st-century timelines, doomed, at least in part, regardless of what political and social choices we make now? (Nor is it ever really explained why Gavin turns so quickly on Verity and Eunice, unless it’s simply to inject the story with urgency and transform it into the author’s favorite plot device, the chase.) This is vintage, or possibly tired, Gibson, filling his usual quest-driven template with updated contemporary or just-past-contemporary politics, technology, and culture.
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-101-98693-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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