A meaty, violent SF/horror thriller that has a lot to say about mad science, inequity, and social decay.
In Ginn’s SF novel, citizens of 2045 Amsterdam begin to succumb to a frightening syndrome that turns them into flesh-hungry zombie-like maniacs.
Europe in year 2045 abides under the “Authority,” a cabal of corporate service-providers that seized power after widespread disasters and social breakdowns stemming from climate change–generated fires and superstorms in 2028. The “Habitable Band” of the ravaged continent contains fortress-like cities and biodomes. By Authority decree, inhabitants are divided into the privileged and valued “Us” class, the middle-ground “Servs,” and the merely tolerated “Unders.” Amsterdam is a technologically advanced showcase city in which the Us are rewarded with life-extension serums from AgeFree, one of the mighty corporate brands. In the shadows, AgeFree’s mysterious founder, Zeno Alkehest, obtains and upgrades serums by abducting citizens (preferably Unders, but all levels are fair game), extracting certain body proteins, and then releasing the unwilling donors, who are chemically rendered amnesiac. The eighth iteration of the elixir has the side effect of physically and mentally degrading users, turning them into bleeding, psychotic maniacs hungering for human flesh. Alkehest pressures politicians, the police, the media, and the dreaded Security & Intelligence Service to contain and cover up the spreading horrors. Apprentice street gangster Arief Teheri, who is of Moroccan descent, gleans the awful truth and teams up with an Us rebel schoolboy/hacker named Jay and an Ethiopian named Yaba, to expose AgeFree’s crimes. Ginn’s background includes TV production and interactive media, and he brings cinematic worldbuilding touches to a rich narrative that combines the elements of dystopian SF, political intrigue, splatterpunk, and street-level crime thrillers. The narrative name-checks real-life author Naomi Klein and her Bush/Cheney-inspired The Shock Doctrine (2007) to inform the novel’s incisive portrayal of predatory capitalism (“People were there to be used up, then discarded”) as CEOs take full advantage of a crisis to maximize influence and profit. A late-stage revelation takes the material into borderline occult territory—and even this works.
A meaty, violent SF/horror thriller that has a lot to say about mad science, inequity, and social decay. (science fiction)Pub Date: June 15, 2026
ISBN: 978-9083543314
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Hubbub Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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