This captivating tale ponders whether technology actually enhances humanity.
A debut novel creates a grim, dystopian world in which evolving robots pose a deadly threat.
In the future Vancouver, Fusion, a terminal disorder carried by both men and women, has ended sexual intimacy. Instead, humans have turned to synthetic sex bots to provide them pleasure. Other synthetics form a subservient labor force. Police Detective Wendy Chrome discovers things are changing in this ordered world. Aberrations are popping up, including a male sex bot impregnating human women and a pair of synthetics falling in love. The Binding Program, which makes humans the robots’ masters, is breaking down. This results in robots gaining sentience. Chrome and her fellow detective, Gregory Brand, attempt to discover what is causing these phenomena. Contributing to the problem are those performing illegal experimentation, such as sleazy synthetics technician Kaleb Johansen, who will skirt any societal law to satisfy himself. Caught in the middle are sex bots Naomi Graves and Zephy. Naomi’s human personality was transferred by Kaleb into a synthetic. There are larger forces at work behind this revolution that no one suspects. So the more Chrome and Brand investigate a series of seemingly unrelated events, the more dangerous their mission becomes. Soon they’re struggling to save humanity from a synthetics’ uprising. In this tale, Aegis has developed a complex world that unquestioningly accepts an unsettling status quo. It’s a society where men rule and women like Chrome are treated only slightly better than synthetics (Chrome “wanted to call them out as the chauvinistic idiots they were, but she knew from experience that others wouldn’t support her”). The intriguing novel is populated by a series of flawed characters, whether it’s Naomi, a human vapor addict now stuck in the body of a sex bot; Zephy, the quick-thinking synthetic at the forefront of the evolution; or cynical Chrome, still filled with regret at the loss of her first love. The author integrates thought-provoking concepts, such as the overlords versus an underclass, within the structure of this thriller. The work explores the question of what happens after the revolution.
This captivating tale ponders whether technology actually enhances humanity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 349
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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