Social media improves a dystopian future (ugh, right?) in this provocative, cyberpunk series.
Debut author Infantino launches his cli-fi series in a post-apocalyptic U.S.
Infantino sets his Wakeful Wanderer series on an Earth devastated by catastrophic climate change. Rising sea levels caused a “Great Tide,” a doomsday event that sent North America into anarchy. The poor and self-righteously angry hunted and killed the wealthy in a murder spree known as “The Vengeance.” Many of those same mobs (and some surviving dynasties) filled the power gap, ruling regions in a feudal style. An exception to the force and brutality is the “Interconnected,” high-tech humans with neural implants that link their minds at all times. Cooperative, altruistic, and empathetic, the Interconnected control sections of America’s Northeastern seaboard, especially from Boston to Tarrytown, although, thanks to their mass consciousness, they rarely need to travel. Uniting the post-apocalyptic communities, in the manner of the vagabond hero of David Brin’s The Postman (1985), is “Wakeful Wanderer” Marto Boxster. A travel blogger of sorts, Marto beams his prose directly to minds of followers as he explores neurolinked and technophobic settlements. An orphan Interconnected who considers his work a return to old-style journalism, he “writes” (and thinks directly to others, an art known as “thexting”) of his travels via motorized unicycle throughout the territories. Countless online/interactive followers learn one another’s cultures and histories through him. But the Interconnected have enemies in the form of lingering Vengeance gangs and jealous Luddite technophobes whose throwback conservative philosophies condemn these new post-humans as “xombie” abominations. Marto, while on the road, discovers discomfiting truths about himself and his origins during a conspiracy to attack the upgraded folk and return the U.S. (or what’s left of it) to “traditional” values of rule by money, violence, and slavery.
Infantino is an established musician, though only late in the narrative does he start dropping album names and song titles. Instead of this being a singer/songwriter’s dreaded side gig, the book is solid speculative fiction about transhumanist and climate issues, though by no means is it the first near-future novel to foresee a society dominated by social media (the term is never used, by the way). Via Marto and other characters, the author ruminates on the Interconnected’s progressive system of political and social economy based on “Merits” (think “likes” brought to its ultimate fulfillment) and paying it forward. The author’s evaluation of this seemingly idyllic, peaceable coexistence among those whose lives are improved by cybertechnology isn’t exactly a full endorsement of better living through science, although the bad guys enact their sinister scheme before the debates with Marto reach any sort of conclusion. Still, it’s fair to say that the Interconnected are a nicer bunch of New Englanders to inherit the Earth than their reactionary rivals. More volumes in the series have been completed, and one looks forward to more of this unsettlingly plausible world.
Social media improves a dystopian future (ugh, right?) in this provocative, cyberpunk series.Pub Date: March 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-456278-9
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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