A didactic dystopian tale that lacks self-awareness.
An experimental community forms a society from scratch in this speculative political novel.
The rules of Microcosm are simple: Its 30,000 residents decide for themselves how to live. There’s no set government; every person has equal resources and opportunities, and they can use them as they see fit: “No longer could people complain that they’d had an unfair disadvantage—people would either sink or swim by their own abilities and decisions, or lack thereof.” This doesn’t work well for everyone, but it seems to work fine for 45-year-old Patton Larsen, who lost his wife and three kids in a car accident and came to Microcosm—or Blue Creek, as the community later comes to be known—to hide away from the world. However, when the lack of laws leads to anxiety and instability, there’s pressure to form a government, though the more libertarian-minded residents, like Patton, vehemently oppose the notion. People tell him that he’s just being paranoid, and eventually, he concedes to working with his neighbors to form the best (and smallest) government possible. Even so, three citizens who rise to power—Charlie Henry, David Asher, and Anna Radinski—quickly implement dictatorial policies that are characterized as socialist. Patton and a small group of like-minded citizens resist the machinations of these would-be tyrants and work to guarantee the liberties of the people of Blue Creek—even if the price is blood. Debut author Hansen offers an intriguing premise in this novel. However, unlike the researchers running the experiment, he’s no impartial observer to the events that he describes; he acknowledges his own disdain for progressivism in his introduction, and the book has a clear and intended libertarian bent throughout. In the end, however, Hansen curiously undercuts his own argument, as the libertarian Utopia of Microcosm is revealed to be structurally unsound, and it falls quickly into a state of instability that, in turn, gives rise to a new regime. The characters are also disappointingly one-dimensional, and Patton, in particular, seems almost like a parody of self-righteous American masculinity.
A didactic dystopian tale that lacks self-awareness.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6058-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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