A thoughtful, involving tale about remarkable human allies fighting an insidious AI.
A software engineer finds herself ripped from her present and drafted into a battle against a rogue artificial intelligence in the future in this SF thriller.
Harper Lewis, Mulligan’s protagonist, discovers that she can roll with the punches (in some cases, literally). One minute, the software engineer is trapped with a snake inside her car on a busy Florida highway. The next, she’s waking up in a sterile room and being greeted by an attractive man. The man, Dalian Garcia, informs her that her consciousness is inside the body of Ambassador Prayze Hale, one of the human leaders of Atlanta in 2123, a city now run by AI partially designed by the diplomat. Dalian soon betrays Harper, handing her over to Ebba Shaw, the leader of one of the “natural” (unenhanced) villages that eschew technology. Harper, who is tortured, gets rescued by Linaria, Prayze’s fellow ambassador and on-again, off-again lover, and they take Kade Murphy, a “natural” in need of medical care, back to the city with them. They piece together that Mazin, the AI security chief, has created a method to control humans, forcing them to either leave the city or do his bidding. With Mazin conspiring against them, Harper/Prayze, Linaria, and fellow ambassador Hiran Patel have to develop a way to erase the security chief without disrupting the comfortable lives of the city’s citizens. Mulligan, once a coder, has clearly given a lot of thought to the implications of AI leaders, which form the foundation of her novel. Harper gets to see one potential future stemming from her type of work, while Prayze observes the negative results of her well-meaning innovations. Despite chapters alternating between Harper’s present and Prayze’s recent past and a familiar rise-of-the-machine backdrop, the narrative unfolds smoothly. A high point of the book is watching Harper and Prayze attempt to operate in each other’s eras. Harper, a nobody in her own time, rises to the challenge, making selfless choices to save a future that’s not her own. The genius Prayze is less adept at becoming a part of Harper’s world. But both protagonists are needed to rescue a flawed future in this engaging and provocative story.
A thoughtful, involving tale about remarkable human allies fighting an insidious AI.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2021
ISBN: 9781737787525
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Mullory Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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