A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.
Faced with the end of his marriage, a mild-mannered man starts to question the omnipotent data-based System that regulates his society in this sci-fi novel.
Big Brother becomes Big PDA in author Davidson’s hands. In a future United Kingdom, the System is developed as a panacea to the world’s ills—an omnipotent online database, personal planner, and social network regulating all aspects of life. It monitors and communicates with its users via surgically implanted mobile units. The System’s artificial intelligence, with its prime directive to look after mankind’s security, is supposedly infallible, so nearly everyone gratefully follows its dictates, which have largely eradicated crime, poverty, and global overpopulation. (Never mind that dissenters who publicly question the System tend to disappear.) Advertising man Wallace Blair has especially close personal connections with the System; his grandfather had a part in its design, and his father currently holds a high maintenance position. Wallace is notified that his blissful marriage to Mary, a fanatical System believer, has been automatically moved to pre-divorce “Transition” status. Suddenly daring to doubt the System’s perfect judgment, he goes off the grid to delve into taboo family secrets—specifically, his grandfather’s mysterious breakdown and retreat from public life shortly after the System became active. At least, Wallace thinks he’s off the grid. Davidson seeds clues here and there that this indolent, apathetic, technology-blighted society is of a piece with the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 dystopian satire Brave New World, which is looking less like satire with every passing year. Furthermore, he avoids the temptation to dazzle readers with florid descriptions of sci-fi marvels and jargon. Wisely, he keeps the System thoroughly offstage and mysterious—no towering computer-mainframe headquarters, no mecha battle-troops à la The Terminator (1984)—which makes the invisible, paranoid AI even more disquieting and the society which enabled it, equally so. A good deal of the plotline, in fact, addresses the relationships between three generations of Blair men. Plodder Wallace never develops into much of a rebel, any more than Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith did, which goes much against the grain of the blockbuster mentality that typifies novels such as The Hunger Games (2008). However, it’s appropriate to the elegiac, downbeat tone.
A staid, melancholy, cautionary sci-fi tale with an Orwellian, fablelike quality.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511491099
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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