A loosely plotted, seriocomic pageant of humanity’s failures and foibles from a sympathetic robot POV.
In Dennstedt’s SF novel, an extraterrestrial robot is tasked with monitoring humanity’s painful ascent back to civilization after a devastating global war.
A worldwide war reduces humankind to stone-age savages ignorant of their high-tech glorious past. A concerned alien civilization, unable to directly intervene due to environmental issues, dispatches the narrator to the benighted planet; he’s a durable humanoid robot capable of self-repair and camouflage to blend with Homo sapiens. His mission is to spend millennia gently guiding the human race back to enlightenment and responsible function. The robot has a hummingbird-shaped scout drone called Billy who flits in out of the storyline, sometimes fatefully. The robot is a Wandering Jew-meets-Candide type figure who acquires assorted nicknames over the centuries but ultimately settles on “Scoots,” shortened to “Scot.” With new exploratory information periodically uploaded from Billy, Scot befriends a series of people, from children to a fairly enlightened monarch to a sailing-ship’s crew to a leper colony’s matriarch to a slum lord. Scot innocently strives to set sensible and ethical examples, but human aggression and perfidy often subvert the guileless hero’s motives. His mass-produced toys inspire the coinage of money and commensurate greed; marketplace pressures turn his repair shop into a gun factory; and his superspeed with firearms gets him conscripted into strongman/enforcer duties. Even after humanity evolves to build idyllic cities, will the Earthlings just blow everything up again? Dennstedt supplements his novel I, Robot Soldier (2024) with this robo-yarn, which is only tenuously connected and can be read as a standalone. The episodic narrative owes debts, acknowledged up front, to SF grandmasters Isaac Asimov (whose Three Laws of Robotics come into play) and Robert Heinlein (Scot is the proverbial and eternal stranger in a strange land). The parable-like storytelling eschews hard science and works in a moderate amount of sardonic humor (“You know, Scot, if you plan on encouraging the human race, you probably should work on your people skills a little more”) as Scot violates a few prime directives to realize his goal. Illustrations by the author are generated via AI.
A loosely plotted, seriocomic pageant of humanity’s failures and foibles from a sympathetic robot POV.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798285935308
Page Count: 334
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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Curiously compelling but not entirely satisfying.
The fourth and final volume in the Terra Ignota series, a science fantasy set on a 25th-century Earth where people affiliate by philosophy and interest instead of geography.
For the first time in centuries, the world is seized by war—once the combatants actually figure out how to fight one. While rivalries among the Hives provide several motives for conflict, primary among them is whether J.E.D.D. Mason, the heir to various political powers and apparently a god from another universe in human form, should assume absolute rule over the world and transform it for the better. Gathering any large group to further the progress of the war or the possibility for peace is hampered by the loss of the world transit system of flying cars and the global communications network, both shut down by parties unknown, indicating a hidden and dangerous faction manipulating the situation for its own ends. As events play out, they bear a strong resemblance to aspects of the Iliad and the Odyssey, suggesting the persistent influence of Bridger, a deceased child who was also probably a god. Is tragedy inevitable, or can the characters defy their apparent fates? This often intriguing but decidedly peculiar chimera of a story seems to have been a philosophical experiment, but it’s difficult to determine just what was being tested. The worldbuilding—part science, part magic—doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny, and the political structure defies comprehension. The global government consists of an oligarchy of people deeply and intimately connected by love and hate on a scale which surpasses the royal dynasties of old, and it includes convicted felons among their number. Perhaps the characters are intended as an outsized satiric comment on the way politicians embrace expediency over morality or personal feelings, but these supposedly morally advanced potentates commit so many perverse atrocities against one another it is difficult to engage with them as people. At times, they seem nearly as alien as J.E.D.D. Mason.
Curiously compelling but not entirely satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7806-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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