A lean, well-oiled narrative speeds this multilayered sci-fi story through occasionally obvious circuitry.
After accepting a Faustian bargain to be transformed into a full-body cyborg serving a nonhuman race, heroine Anomie realizes she’s part of a conspiracy deeper than she can imagine.
Miller’s tricky blend of cyberpunk, intrigue, action, racial politics and morality begins with heroine Anomie, a black woman in future San Francisco, lying mangled in a hospital room. A shady firm called Silk Road approaches her with a repugnant but evidently well-known offer: In exchange for a payout in millions of euros, she will allow her wrecked body to be replaced by a full, superstrong cybernetic prosthesis known as a “frend”—Finite Robotics Enhanced Neurosensory Development. Miller describes the long, grueling surgical process without gore but with just enough detail to get the reader’s (presumably organic) teeth grinding. Thus reborn, Anomie discovers she has leased herself to be a veritable plaything of the lumen, a noncorporeal race of software-based intelligence—think Skynet from the Terminator movies—inhabiting the bodies of various robots who have a yen for devising hideous ordeals. Apparently, if it weren’t for the physically toughened frends to amuse the powerful lumen, their whims would viciously turn on the entire human race. Anomie comes to realize that she has actually been carefully inserted into this nightmarish servitude and also in a mission to infiltrate the lumen and exploit their weaknesses. But how? And by whom? Canny readers may too easily decode the surface plot as Robert Ludlum stuff blended with Ray Kurzweil’s vision of Homo sapiens combining with machines. A big reveal at the end becomes painfully obvious midway through—Bourne Identity Theft, one might say. Nevertheless, Miller’s skillful economy of language and penchant for playing the cards close to the vest—or chest plate—works to his advantage as the tale picks up momentum/mayhem and puts an intriguing, nonstereotypical lead character through pitfalls and deadly perils of parahumanity. Ghost in the Shell fans will have a blast.
A lean, well-oiled narrative speeds this multilayered sci-fi story through occasionally obvious circuitry.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502761156
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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