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
A plodding novel from a talented writer.
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide.
“They killed themselves,” explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell’s high-concept novel. “One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.” Charlie is a Black man who’s served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: “Only a fragile structure remained….” Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she’s heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that “the world got left to the heathens” and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell’s novel starts off fairly strong—it’s undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment—but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author’s often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney’s transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series.
A plodding novel from a talented writer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668034927
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
