An engaging tale featuring cli-fi, college intrigue, romance, and particle physics.
A physics graduate student in a future Colorado wracked by climate change disasters faces multiple dangers when she attempts momentous experiments in clean-energy production and time reversal.
Smith offers this SF novel as a prequel to her parallel-universes adventure Kat Cubed (2016). The setting is an unnamed Colorado college campus in March 2098. Kathy Garcia is a 27-year-old grad student, part of a group of brainy folks recruited from all over the world. They are hoping to reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change by achieving fusion-based clean energy in a magnetic-field reactor called a “Tokamak.” But a freak avalanche (one of numerous altered-weather disasters) sweeps through the physics building, killing some of Kathy’s colleagues and devastating the technology—which, in an academic milieu destabilized by pandemics, wildfires, hunger, economic malaise, and increased mortality, was not the best anyway. Improvising with computers and gear salvaged from a nearby, relatively undamaged neutrino studies laboratory, Kathy and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jake Moretti—and Ellen, the protagonist’s helpful, phone-based software, personal assistant app who seems to be evolving into a true artificial intelligence—seek to continue the project. But they encounter unexpected opposition and professional jealousy from other members of the international research team. As the stakes escalate to the truly life-threatening, Kathy makes the amazing discovery of a Tokamak side effect that could effectively serve as a microcosmic form of time travel and a vehicle for reaching out to earlier generations for help. Readers already acquainted with Kat Cubed will know that the ultimate result is three alternating, dystopian-future realities, all afflicted to varying degrees by climate change. This prelude can be enjoyed as more or less a stand-alone even if readers don’t know a Tokamak from an autoclave. The author is a scientist in real life and a prolific author of largely whimsical romps incorporating concepts of physics and probability. Smith delivers a nicely casual voice, a hero whose concessions to swear words are minor things likeGaia, yikes!and flooding (instead of the other f-word), and highly advanced science in doses manageable and nonpedantic enough for general readers.
An engaging tale featuring cli-fi, college intrigue, romance, and particle physics.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950198-35-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A plodding novel from a talented writer.
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide.
“They killed themselves,” explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell’s high-concept novel. “One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.” Charlie is a Black man who’s served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: “Only a fragile structure remained….” Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she’s heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that “the world got left to the heathens” and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell’s novel starts off fairly strong—it’s undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment—but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author’s often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney’s transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series.
A plodding novel from a talented writer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668034927
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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