Well-constructed, clever libertarian/conservative dystopian SF action; fun despite the harangues.
In a dystopian America of 2084, a Kansas farm couple searches for their kidnapped children.
The title of this opener in a political/SF trilogy by author Keena begs comparison to George Orwell’s magisterial Nineteen Eighty-Four. As with Orwell’s speculation and dire warnings (sometimes cited), this alternates between narrative and extensive essays and soliloquies. By 2041, the United States has a new Constitution (attacking gun ownership, among other individual liberties) pushing the socialist agenda of a dominant political party that is unnamed, but one could probably guess. By 2053, with a crashed economy resulting in suspension of social services and active extermination of the aged, a second Civil War ignites. Tyrant President Regis, leading a Washington cabal of elites (called, of course, the Elites), violently crushes dissent, but he loses control west of the Mississippi and much of the South to “Outcast” rebels. In largely anarchic Kansas, common-law couple Dark Sun and Dark Moon tries to ride out everything off the grid with their two kids. It’s a shocking turn when Elite commandos raid and destroy their homestead just to abduct their son and daughter, Curious and Cammy. The desperate parents join a ragtag “gypsy” caravan, dodging vicious factions (and racist stereotypes) in the war (barbarous Islamists, vicious Latin drug-cartel “Jackals,” ghoulish organ-transplant thieves) on an improbable rescue mission. Orwell’s style is staid compared with Keena’s regular action-combat sequences, practically spilling off the page in living Breitbart News–like scope. When breaks come for lectures (which are frequent), readers are treated to you-won’t-hear-this-uttered-on-college-campuses editorials against the nanny-state authoritarian brand of liberalism and the tools of power it exploited (global-warming phantasms, victim complexes, entitlement mindsets) to tear down the USA. It is a little daffy to be informed early that real villains behind the scenes are a secret society (so secret they created myths of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Bilderbergs to throw off suspicion) that has controlled Earth for centuries, fearing only the wisdom of the Founding Fathers as a threat to their oligarchy. Late in the material—which indeed maintains a suspenseful momentum despite the sermons—a new “Declaration of Free Interdependence” is detailed as a suitable ideological weapon against big-government evil.
Well-constructed, clever libertarian/conservative dystopian SF action; fun despite the harangues. (author bio)Pub Date: April 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949021-86-8
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.
The world as we know it ended in Wanderers, Wendig’s 2019 bestseller. Now what?
A sequel to a pandemic novel written during an actual pandemic sounds pretty intense, and this one doesn’t disappoint, heightened by its author’s deft narrative skills, killer cliffhangers, and a not inconsiderable amount of bloodletting. To recap: A plague called White Mask decimated humanity, with a relative handful saved by a powerful AI called Black Swan that herded this hypnotized flock to Ouray, Colorado. Among the survivors are Benji Ray, a scientist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Shana Stewart, who is pregnant and the reluctant custodian of the evolving AI (via nanobots, natch); Sheriff Marcy Reyes; and pastor Matthew Bird. In Middle America, President Ed Creel, a murdering, bigoted, bullying Trump clone, raises his own army of scumbags to fight what remains of the culture wars. When Black Swan kidnaps Shana’s child, she and Benji set off on another cross-country quest to find a way to save him. On their way to CDC headquarters, they pick up hilariously foulmouthed rock god Pete Corley, back from delivering Willie Nelson’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This novel is an overflowing font of treasures peppered with more than a few pointed barbs for any Christofacists or Nazis who might have wandered in by accident. Where Wanderers was about flight in the face of menace, this is an old-fashioned quest with a small band of noble heroes trying to save the world while a would-be tyrant gathers his forces. All those big beats, not least a cataclysmic showdown in Atlanta, are tempered by the book’s more intimate struggles, from Shana’s primal instinct to recover her boy to the grief Pete buries beneath levity to Matthew Bird’s near-constant grapple with guilt. It’s a lot to take in, but Pete’s ribald, bombastic humor as well as funny interstitials and epigraphs temper the horror within.
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15877-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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