The robot-uprising premise gets a bracing reboot with an intriguing new operating system.
In an oppressive future America, where authorities persecute rogue movements that promote the rights of artificial intelligence, a software-based entity arises to lead a rebellion.
Keller commences a trilogy with this SF entry set in 2142 America, a dystopian surveillance state overseen by dreaded “String Police” using algorithms to predict potential criminals and terrorists. Suspects can be arrested—even killed—in the process (there is a subtle nod to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, the most famous depiction of the concept). But the government and its noxious, ambitious Joint Chiefs Gen. Thomas Mitchell have reason to be paranoid. Robots, androids, and other AI systems have surpassed human intelligence (though acknowledgement of the fact is forbidden), and the establishment fears the dawning of machine awareness. Unauthorized activist movements, including an illegal “Robochurch,” promote the rights of synthetic beings despite harsh push back from authorities. Moreover, a software-based entity calling herself Maia Stone becomes conscious. Claiming only benign, altruistic goals of peaceful human-machine coexistence (if she can be trusted), Maia Stone manifests omnipotently throughout cyberspace as a virtual goddess figure symbolizing and leading a machine revolution. Only in the second act does Keller supply a major backstory—that this technology-choked, misogynistic society, via artificial wombs and programmed sex-robot “wives,” has effectively made women obsolete. They face species extinction. Is Maia Stone a disguised superweapon of the feminists, a tool of tech resisters, or even a creation of power-mad Mitchell? The novel makes a notable comparison/contrast to Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse franchise, whose cartoony, Steven Spielberg–friendly action propelled it up bestseller lists. Often narrated by Maia Stone herself in Scripture-like terms, Keller’s tale delivers much more high-density stuff, brainy with themes of theology, nonviolent activism, determinism, gender inequality, the definition of sentience, and the ethics of being a deity (or the nearest thing to one). Smart readers may note the clever shoutouts to the Short Circuit comedy movies, Spartacus, and other properties. If antics and dialogue sometimes noisily mesh gears with too many big ideas in play, the rich abundance of those concepts is, in the words of an old Apple ad campaign, insanely great. Maia the Force be with the sequel.
The robot-uprising premise gets a bracing reboot with an intriguing new operating system.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73723-040-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TiLu Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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