A thrilling race to save the planet and humanity itself.
In Lemmert’s SF novel, a mysterious epidemic sweeps across Earth.
One thousand years from now, most humans have left the dying Earth and settled on other planets. With less of humanity present to wreak environmental destruction, Earth has recovered. Now under a centralized government, both humans and the planet seem to be flourishing, though those who have traveled to other worlds still view Earth-dwellers as backward (“Their gendered world, which operates in part through sexual desires, seems animalistic”). After being dropped on Earth for an extended research trip, Dr. Aurora Miti has fallen in love with Dr. Nicholas Munyakazi, as well as the beautiful “sanctuary,” a large nature preserve created to give various species of plants and animals a safe place to live and grow. While Aurora is enjoying her time on Earth, her former shipmates continue on toward a distant sphere, Zeta-2, where a mutiny leaves the leader, Regina, stranded on the planet alone. Returning later, the crewmates expect to find her dead, but, surprisingly, she’s alive. The small team who bring her back on board soon come down with a mysterious illness that leaves them dead before anyone can figure out what’s wrong. As the crew quarantines on Earth’s moon to determine what’s happening, an animal protection organization gets ahold of the deadly microbe and transmits it to Earth, where it runs rampant through the population. In this speculative novel, the author takes readers on an absorbing journey far into the future, continuing the story begun in Lemmert’s previous novel from 2021, Life, Unedited. For new readers, the author provides a summary of events from the first book, which is incredibly helpful, if a bit of an information overload so early on in the story. Given recent historical events, the quarantine procedures and the rush to find a vaccine for a disease unlike anything doctors have seen before feel incredibly relevant and are likely to keep readers on the edges of their seats.
A thrilling race to save the planet and humanity itself.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Brendara
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.
Witte surveys our apocalyptic times in this poetry collection.
The title of this collection became a kind of slogan during the Covid pandemic. Simultaneously evoking the variable danger of the virus and the uncertain institutional response to it, the newly ubiquitous phrase heralded a suspension of normal life, explaining why we must no longer go near one another. As the speaker riffs in the title poem, “Proceed as if on shattered glass / around suspicious passersby / eyeing each other’s mask and gloves, / give way or cross the street devoid / of traffic, nowhere to commute, / on holiday but isolate.” Rather than presenting such furtiveness as a freakish deviation from the normal, the author suggests that these behaviors are more or less par for the course; in his view, humans tend toward defensiveness, reticence, hesitancy, and self-isolation. “Necks bow in unison, / alone,” begins “Who What When Where Why”; “At church or phone / in urgent prayer, awaiting / word: when and where / dread happens.” “Reap” begins in a damning, near-biblical register: “We sing what we have sown low voices hushed / in hope and shame before whatever ear / might listen in excuses salting praise / as meat is seasoned to devour as we / devour our kind…” There’s an omniscience to the poems that allows the speaker to fade into the background. Witte seems more interested in writing about the collective than the specific individual; in these poems, people are specters, shadows, whispers, shuffling forms who crowd and dissipate, witness and conspire. They move in a landscape dotted with the husks of cicada nymphs, dead birds, decapitated snakes, and underfed zoo animals. The apocalypse is here, brought on not so much by dystopian technology or a ravaged climate as by our own inability to be with one another.
The lacuna-filled verses read—in the best way—like they were written 80 years ago. The poet’s incredible attention to image and rhythm and insistence upon the exact right word create an incantatory sense of inevitability. In “Back of the Napkin,” the speaker delivers some climate math in a latter-day Domesday Book: “Assuming seven years the balance / tips both poles collapse so / oceans fall like hungry ghosts / upon our grain and property / then figure fifty give or / take’s when nothing stays sun / surveilling what it lasers off / infernos roam the highland….” It’s a slightly antiquated, modernist sensibility, but it perfectly captures something of the very recent past—the late Trump/early Covid era. When a more individualized speaker appears in the book’s final section, the reader has a sense that it’s too late, that everything has already been lost. There’s a historian’s resignation to it all, a sense that the last man is scribbling down the final observations about a civilization on the brink of collapse: “Above damp sand trash whirls like restless souls. / Warm humid afterbreath floods ventricles / with suffocating ease. I think we’re done.”
An era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780991378067
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An imaginative but jumbled journey through the mysteries of earthly existence.
Blair’s absurdist novella explores space and time from prehistory to the modern day.
The story opens at a cocktail party in Texas in 1999—one that’s full of paleontologists. Their conversation eventually moves to the “sail-backed, four-legged animals” of millions of years ago. One of the attendees posits that such creatures evolved their large sails as “biological telepathy amplifiers”; they may have enabled a form of communication like “Eleventh Generation wireless biotech.” The narrative then shifts to “274,578 millennia and three weeks before The Tunguska Event.” Sail-backed creatures are, in fact, communicating telepathically; as it turns out, they also have different religions that feature divergent interpretations of consciousness. Soon, the book shifts to a message from the author, who expresses a wish to thank various people, including champion chess player Garry Kasparov and a man named Oden Griffin with whom the author “shared a dining experience” at a Burger King. Such wild swerves in time, setting, and content continue as the story goes on. They feature “blueprints” brought to Earth by aliens and an ancient “Dorian-Mycenaean-Teutonic extravaganza,” which is, in fact, an orgy that proves dangerous to its participants. In 2019, a Martian microbe slips through “a shortcut in the fabric of space-time to go directly from Mars to Earth”: the origin of Covid-19, at least in some universes. Also, in one version of reality, Gary Gilmore—a convicted murderer in the real world—becomes the 40th president of the United States. In an epilogue, the author explains oddities from his own experience, including a college football game that seems to have been played twice.
If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Even the seemingly ordinary atmosphere of the cocktail party in the opening chapter has its share of bizarre turns, with characters referred to only as “the buster” or “caddie.” Readers quickly know to pay very close attention—and to abandon all expectations for what might come next, since that could be “a realm of space-time transcending a very exact location in the timelines of being exactly here or there.” The dialogue includes lines such as “Sometimes when I walk on land and sometimes when I fly in the sky I remember them more vividly than when I swim in the sea.” Still, despite the daunting atmosphere, the work has real heart amid all the verbosity; at one point, for instance, the text presents the last two living dimetrodons, who can feel “emanations from what would prove to be the beginning of the end for trillions of quadrillions of the Earth’s inhabitants”—an unexpectedly touching image. Many descriptions, such as a reference to humans as “major mixtures of compassion, passion, dispassion, wisdom, folly, hatred, apathy, love, agitation, and equanimity” have a certain poetry to them. Humans, in these pages, are “like nothing the planet has ever seen before,” even though “the very notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ are sometimes-illusory parts of a cosmic labyrinth of epic proportions.” There’s a lot to dig through, but such gems can be found.
An imaginative but jumbled journey through the mysteries of earthly existence.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2022
ISBN: 9798985909449
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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