An offbeat and sometimes-powerful tale that holds out hope that love without prejudice will save us all.
Breniman’s SF novel presents a romp through one throuple’s attempt to solve all of humanity’s problems.
This novel, set on a futuristic Earth, follows three main characters in a committed relationship who stumble into becoming “MMMperors” after they invent a radical, AI-enhanced bed that predicts one’s sexual needs. Chip, Tâm, and TaDoo (who communes with aliens) had no designs on leading a struggling human race, but they rise to the occasion while on a psychedelic journey. Assisted by their floating, benevolent AI creature, QuBit, the MMMperors show humankind, and alienkind, how sexual freedom, microdosing psychedelics, and listening to just the right genre-bending song mashup can heal all wounds. But just as they’re getting close to fixing everything, tragedy strikes, forcing one MMMperor to figure out how to move forward. Alternately satirical and heartfelt, amusing and sorrowful, this novel proposes that the remedies for what plagues humanity—disconnection, war, hunger, disease—may lie in radical forms of love and intimacy. The work is bolstered by Breniman’s background as a death doula, and its descriptions of grief, hope, and the emotions that exist between them feel real and compelling: “Grief, it turns out, is a nervous system event as much as it is a spiritual reckoning.” The novel unfortunately suffers from telling readers the story, rather than dramatizing it. It’s effectively structured as a lengthy essay, complete with subheadings, notational asides, and informational inserts; as such, the narrative reads as if everything is happening at a strange remove, which is only emphasized by the novel’s nonlinear format. The story leapfrogs through time and space like a mind-bending drug, but the novel is saved from being confounding by the humor and warmth of Breniman’s distinctive voice.
An offbeat and sometimes-powerful tale that holds out hope that love without prejudice will save us all.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798901742501
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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