A celebration of queer and Afrofuturist science fiction saluting creativity in difference.
In her debut collection, musician and actress Monáe collaborates with a different writer for every story to explore a world defined by some people's resistance to a dangerous surveillance state in which memories are currency.
An introduction, "Breaking Dawn," lays out the collection's guiding thought experiment: In a world with cameras everywhere, most people have accepted the idea that "an eye in the sky might protect us from...ourselves, our world"—and soon, not content with seeing the surface of things, the New Dawn found ways "past the encrypted walls of our minds," into people's thoughts and memories. This constant surveillance divides the nation into those who are safe and clean and those who are "deviant, complex"—the dirty computers. The title story, written with Alaya Dawn Johnson, explores the life of Seshet, the Director Librarian of Little Delta, the New Dawn's highest-ranking position. Interested in the contradictions of bureaucracy and the conflict within someone with the power to enforce rules who doesn't abide by them, Seshet investigates the curious background of her new lover. “Nevermind” is both a memory-enhancing drug and a story (written with Danny Lore) set in an off-grid community where women and nonbinary people can exist free from “people trying to force so much on [them]. Capitalism for one; monogamy for another.” The theme of collective resistance continues in some of the other stories. In "Timebox," written with Eve L. Ewing, a couple discovers extra time hidden in their pantry, pushing them to grapple with inequities in the way time is distributed. The last story, “Timebox Alta(red),” written with Sheree Renée Thomas, has a group of children create an altar that transports them through time and space, showing that you can’t build the future if you don’t dream it first. Studded with references to Monáe's album Dirty Computer (2018), the book is a clever adaptation of music to a new form. Emotionally raw and with a wholehearted love for people, these stories will make readers long to forge deeper human connections by sharing and holding one another's memories.
A celebration of queer and Afrofuturist science fiction saluting creativity in difference.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307087-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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