Erickson’s (Afterlife Code, 2018, etc.) collection of sci-fi stories explores parallel worlds, rogue planets, alien intervention, and more.
Primarily set in the Boston, Cambridge, and Merrimack Valley areas of Massachusetts, these tales often follow a male protagonist who finds that humans don’t understand the laws of the universe as well as they think. In “Recount Our Dreams,” widower Jack Martin is a test subject for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s restricted environmental stimulation therapy project. When an electron accelerator experiment elsewhere on campus goes awry, Jack’s deprivation chamber shunts him into numerous alternate versions of Earth, including one in which meteor collisions depopulate the planet. “Rogue Event” depicts humankind’s decadeslong preparation for the passing of an enormous rogue planet through the Milky Way—an occurrence that will shatter fragile orbits and decrease the sun’s life span; at this point in Earth’s history, corporations fully control society—and displays of emotion are taboo. “The Gray” takes the furthest imaginative leap in its tale of Amber the Elder, “an intersex Cani hominid” who debates whether to eliminate a warring species on Terra Nova Seven, a planet that’s under observation. The stories “Neurogenesis” and “To See Behind Walls” showcase the author’s love of classic literature; the former is an homage to Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (1966) and the latter to James Thurber’s 1939 story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Throughout this collection, Erickson connects his tales in surprising and delightful ways. Events in “Recount Our Dreams,” for example, seem to occur down the hall at MIT from where the developmentally challenged Robert Wright works in “Neurogenesis.” Some ideas beg for deeper exploration, such as the planet in “Rogue Event” that “is linked to our time and space, but its physical science and laws of nature are operating on another plane of existence.” Readers may also be divided on “The Gray,” in which genocide is made to seem like the least of several evils.
A speculative compilation that acknowledges humanity’s long struggle ahead.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942708-25-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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