Intermittently gripping and intense: a debut that dramatizes the what, confuses the how, and mostly evades the why.
In Eskridge's near future, project manager Ren “Jackal” Segura of the huge Ko corporation is a Hope, one of a handful selected by birth for fast-tracking to positions of influence in the world government. Later, however, Jackal learns that she isn't a real Hope: her date and time of birth were faked, because Ko considered it necessary. Depressed and angry, Jackal strikes a colleague, but is permitted to continue her studies—and she's given charge of a project developing a virtual reality that's reprogrammable from within. Then, blamed for a peculiar disaster—accident or act of terrorism, more than 400 people are killed, friends and colleagues included—Jackal agrees to help Ko and the world government hush things up. She accepts a sentence of solitary confinement in VR—inside her own project. Jackal endures for subjective years, undergoing profound readjustments in order to retain her sanity, rejecting memories of her friends, even her female lover, Snow—but then she learns how to escape her cell. Finding herself in Ko-land, though empty of people, Jackal joyously rides her bicycle, dances on tables, and masturbates. Finally, released from VR, she's sent under close surveillance to a grim, distant city. Learning to cope with horrid flashbacks, refusing to divulge how she escaped her cell, Jackal stumbles into Solitaire, a bar run by and for fellow survivors of VR confinement. Shakily, she tries to come to terms with her experience and circumstances.
Intermittently gripping and intense: a debut that dramatizes the what, confuses the how, and mostly evades the why.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008857-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Eos/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.
A rare, rattling space opera—first of a trilogy, or series, from Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
Humanity colonized the solar system out as far as Neptune but then exploration stagnated. Straight-arrow Jim Holden is XO of an ice-hauler swinging between the rings of Saturn and the mining stations of the Belt, the scattered ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. His ship's captain, responding to a distress beacon, orders Holden and a shuttle crew to investigate what proves to be a derelict. Holden realizes it's some sort of trap, but an immensely powerful, stealthed warship destroys the ice-hauler, leaving Holden and the shuttle crew the sole survivors. This unthinkable act swiftly brings Earth, with its huge swarms of ships, Mars with its less numerous but modern and powerful navy, and the essentially defenseless Belt to the brink of war. Meanwhile, on the asteroid Ceres, cynical, hard-drinking detective Miller—we don't find out he has other names until the last few pages—receives orders to track down and "rescue"—i.e. kidnap—a girl, Julie Mao, who rebelled against her rich Earth family and built an independent life for herself in the Belt. Julie is nowhere to be found but, as the fighting escalates, Miller discovers that Julie's father knew beforehand that hostilities would occur. Now obsessed, Miller continues to investigate even when he loses his job—and the trail leads towards Holden, the derelict, and what might prove to be a horrifying biological experiment. No great depth of character here, but the adherence to known physical laws—no spaceships zooming around like airplanes—makes the action all the more visceral. And where Corey really excels is in conveying the horror and stupidity of interplanetary war, the sheer vast emptiness of space and the amorality of huge corporations.
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-12908-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
The narrator is researching for his book, The Day the World Ended, when he comes up against his karass, as he later understands it through Bokononism. It leads him to investigate Dr. Hoenniker, "Father of the A-Bomb," whom his son Little Newt says was playing cat's cradle when the bomb dropped (people weren't his specialty). The good doctor left his children an even greater weapon of devastation in ice-nine, an inheritance which won his ugly daughter a handsome husband; little Newt, a Russian midget just his size for an affair that ended when she absconded with a sliver of ice-nine; and made unlikely Franklin the right hand man of Papa Monzano of San Lorenzo, a make-believe Caribbean republic. On the trail of ice-nine, the narrator comes in for Papa's death and is tapped for the Presidency of San Lorenzo. Lured by sex symbol Mona, he accepts, but before he can take office, ice-nine breaks loose, freezing land and sea. Bokonon, the aged existentialist residing in the jungle as counter to the strong man, formulates a religion that makes up for life altogether: since the natives are miserable and there is little hope for changing their lot, he takes advantage of the release of ice-nine to bring them a happy death. The narrator's karass is at last made clear by Bokonon himself, leaving him to commit a final blasphemy against whoever is up there. A riddle on the meaning of meaninglessness or vice versa in a devastation-oriented era, with science-fiction figures on the prowl and political-ologies lanced. Spottily effective.
Pub Date: March 18, 1963
ISBN: 038533348X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
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