If you thought Immortality was powerful, just wait until you read the sequel.
The fate of humanity may be worse than death in this involving conclusion to Bohacz’s (Immortality, 2007) two-part techno-thriller. Two years have passed since the events of Immortality, when nanotech-plague kill zones reduced the population of the world to a slight fraction of what it had been. No natural disease, the plague was unleashed by the god-machine—an ancient, sentient network housed in supercolonies across the globe—whose inscrutable calculations showed it was to the benefit of Earth for the human population to be pruned back. Although the time of kill zones ended as abruptly as it began, only a few people know the truth—and that truth is a liability the recovering governments cannot allow the public to hear. Dr. Kathy Morrison, a former scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who first studied the kill zones, now lives in a small settlement of scientists in Pueblo Canyon, Ariz., eking out an existence and hoping to stay beneath the government’s radar. The biologist Dr. Mark Freedman lives there, too, as well as former police officer Sarah Mayfair, one of the few to survive after being inside a kill zone. But Mark and Sarah are hybrids now, with the nanotech seeds of the god-machine steadily replacing their biology with nanotechnology, making them smarter, faster and active peripherals in the god-machine’s “n-web network,” the wireless neurological interface carried by bacteria into nearly all multicelled creatures on earth. Across the n-web, Mark and Sarah feel a pull—a “singularity,” as Mark calls it, “like a black hole…sucking in all the data from the n-web around it”—that they’re drawn to investigate. Mark and Sarah leave their refuge on a quest that takes them across the nation and toward a terrifying conclusion. The horrors of the plague, they realize, were only a harbinger of more disasters. Meanwhile, Kathy, fearing what her ex-patient, Sarah, and lover, Mark, were becoming, stays behind only to be discovered by “Peacekeeper” forces under the direction of Gen. McKafferty, a misguided patriot who holds these three responsible for the death of millions; he’ll stop at nothing to capture them. Blending fierce action, twisted conspiracies and bold “transhumanist” visions, Bohacz once again drives readers through a whirlwind in which even the characters aren’t sure if their thoughts are their own or if they were installed by the god-machine. Though the novel occasionally falters under the weighty exposition of its own ideas, Bohacz constantly raises the stakes, and the crisp dialogue and well-drawn characters keep the story barreling forward.
If you thought Immortality was powerful, just wait until you read the sequel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0979181535
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Mazel & Sechel
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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