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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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