An entertaining mix of SF and corporate intrigue that pits futuristic gizmos and ancient wisdom against authoritarian...
Righteous hackers guided by Hindu philosophy battle a sinister mind-control device in Berman’s speculative thriller.
The author depicts a future in which the United States is under the tyrannical rule of a nameless dictator, with democracy holding on in the breakaway nation of California. The plot centers on a “pod” of six employees of the Silicon Valley video game company HastinSys who live together on a Bay Area farm. They include emotionally fragile tech writer Darah Ahmadi; hotheaded coder Beers; levelheaded supercoder Jedd; and progressive ultracoder June. Their nemeses are a rival pod of marketing staffers named Kurt, Karin, and Keith who ruthlessly take over the coders’ penthouse office space and get them displaced to a smaller room. The coders discover that the ‘Ks’ are working with the dictator and his Russian backers to release the Happy App, which can subliminally program users’ brains. Repairing to their farm, the coders try to derail the plot by hacking the app. They are assisted by Ansirk, an unhoused, barefoot, flute-playing teen with an enigmatic smile whose name spelled backward approximates that of the Hindu god Krishna. He provides moral support and brainstorms a promising hacking strategy: They will alter the Happy App to impart the calming “soundless sound” of the primordial universe into users’ minds. The author sets her pastiche of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata in a high-tech civilization—driverless flying cars and holograms abound—and a sleek corporate setting. The novel features nifty capers—Darah seduces a co-worker to plant a bug—along with engrossing procedural sequences, including Jedd’s creation of a virtual road trip to Canada to hide their whereabouts, complete with simulated pit stops and snack purchases. Along the way, Ansirk teaches ethics and advocates giving up control in limpid prose that’s replete with evocative metaphors (“You can go through life like a steering wheel, with your ego-mind running the show. Or you can go through life like [a self-driving vehicle], where your mind takes a back seat and you place your faith in the car’s power”). The result is an imaginative tale alive with captivating ideas.
An entertaining mix of SF and corporate intrigue that pits futuristic gizmos and ancient wisdom against authoritarian politics.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781684632305
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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