Lively sci-fi from an exciting new voice.
In Trant’s debut thriller, social media enables an artificial intelligence to gain consciousness, leading to a frightening future.
Madeline “Maddy” Smith had an unusual childhood. Each summer, she and her father, Ollie, a scientist and computer geek, visited an odd assortment of friends and camped in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. Ollie encouraged Maddy to pursue unusual skills, including music, computer programming, electrical repair, and running, but she always knew there was an unspoken purpose to his lessons. Now a 28-year-old technology writer, Maddy learns that her father has died mysteriously. She later receives a key to her childhood dresser, in which she discovers a strange box that she can’t open. Knowing her father’s love of games, she realizes that the box is the first clue to a mystery. She sets off on a journey to revisit her father’s friends and receive more clues. The trail leads to the apartment of her childhood friend Owen Jagger, who’s now an expert in digital security. Together, they discover that the enigmatic box allows Maddy to travel forward in time. Meanwhile, unknown to Maddy and Jagger, a computer called “IT” is achieving consciousness. For years, it had connected to computer networks and studied human behavior. When social media took off, IT discovered the hashtag—labels attached to uploaded photos, tweets, and videos: “It was like being given the manual on humanity.” Trant’s techno-thriller doesn’t talk down to its audience, and the focus on social media infuses it with a timely, contemporary sensibility. The puzzle at the heart of this novel will hook readers, but the compelling characters will keep them turning the pages. The central conspiracy of the plot keeps the tension high, although the book might have benefited from more appearances by the villain. Maddy, as a character, is the real strength of the story, though, and readers will surely fall for this sympathetic, admirable heroine.
Lively sci-fi from an exciting new voice.Pub Date: March 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5078-8683-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.
In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum; Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know; and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. Jemisin (The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain.
With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-22929-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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