An immersive novel that chillingly predicts a world in which life is something to be escaped rather than experienced.
Houghton (Songs of Seraphina, 2015) explores the difference between living and surviving in this sci-fi thriller.
In the wake of a global climate catastrophe, a new world government re-establishes order as a single nation called the Autonomy. However, this order comes at a price, as the majority of the world’s citizens are simply considered “unit[s] of production.” Workers toil endlessly to create iNet glasses, devices that allow even the lowliest grunt to escape their lives through virtual-reality simulations. The glasses also provide access to the “Faith,” a religion that promises “points” toward salvation in exchange for worldly suffering. Rebellions rise in opposition to the government’s ever tightening control, and many citizens find themselves willing or unwilling participants in the deadly conflict. Pasco Eborgersen, a gambler with ties to the highest level of government, and Balmoral Murraine, an iNet savant from one of the poorest Sectors of the Autonomy, become unlikely allies. They learn secrets that could either save their world or destroy it and that there are people in power who would kill to see that information buried. Although the timeline of Houghton’s novel is somewhat unrealistic—the world goes from utter collapse to an Orwellian government to a rebellion within a span of roughly 30 years—the future society that the author creates is compelling. He gives ample attention to details of the new world’s structure, such as the jellyfish-and-insect-based “skaatch” that serves as the main food product and the commodified social order in which children are named by corporations. The Autonomy exists as a heightened version of the current First World/Third World system, strikingly juxtaposing the ravages of Sector 2 and 3 against the plump privilege of Sector 1. The concept of a gamified religion taps into a cultural obsession with instant gratification and validation while also emphasizing the performative nature of faith. However, Houghton’s attention to detail doesn’t overshadow the novel’s emotional resonance.
An immersive novel that chillingly predicts a world in which life is something to be escaped rather than experienced.Pub Date: July 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-909845-48-0
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Kristell Ink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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SEEN & HEARD
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