by Jamil Nasir ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2013
A futile and self-indulgent exercise in so-whattery.
Nasir revisits familiar territory (The Houses of Time, 2008, etc.) in this venture into alternate realities on the etheric plane.
In a future where everything has been privatized and the government has mutated into a sinister embodiment of the military-industrial complex known as USAdmin, private investigator Heathcliff Ransom, “endovoyant,” puts his ability to interpret psychic emanations and roam around on the astral plane to work on behalf of well-heeled clients. Hired to locate the consciousness of comatose, elderly Margaret Biel by her would-be heirs, Heath finds her in Italy, in an etheric world where she’s occupied a new, young and beautiful body. Worse, he watches as she murders her companion only to find that his own consciousness now occupies the dead man’s body—except that he isn’t dead. Then he falls through a terrifying aperture into further adventures, among whose elements are USAdmin, a mysterious organization called Backward and a possible artificial intelligence, Amphibian. Somebody, meanwhile, attacks and kills everybody at Heath’s offices back in Maryland. Then Heath learns how to switch back and forth between himself as Heath and his new body, Michael. Later still, everybody—including Heath/Michael—somehow gets transformed into virtually immortal androids. What? Why? How? Don’t ask—not only is it unclear which reality is which, or how they’re related, but the protagonist deliberately avoids investigating any of the numerous puzzles—in fact he’s not even curious. So why should readers be? Still later, we slide away into crepuscular, quasi-religious metaphysical nebulas.
A futile and self-indulgent exercise in so-whattery.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-0611-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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by Jamil Nasir
by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2015
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
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