A thrilling superhero journey that remains smart and thoughtful.
A young man must make radical leaps in perception to save humanity from a powerful artificial intelligence in this debut sci-fi novel.
In 2074, the world is half-drowned and dangerous; a few lucky rich people live in protected domes, but most struggle. Arthur Blackstone, 65, a genius trillionaire who founded Blackstone Labs, is dying—to live again. He has just enough time left to transfer his memories to a clone (2 years old chronologically; 10 biologically) and make a will in his favor. A copy of Arthur’s brain, an AI called SINE, is kept in a cyberprison inside Blackstone Labs, dangerous because it’s “a monstrous creation; a super-intelligence without a shred of empathy.” But a security breach caused by Olivia “Liv” Blackstone, Arthur’s granddaughter by adoption, lets SINE loose, which begins its project to take over the world. Meanwhile, Adam Bionine—as the clone is called—grows up in an orphanage with no memories of his past. But in 2084, Adam catches Liv keeping tabs on him. Following her takes Adam off the grid and to a group of rebels bent on bringing down SINE. Adam’s memories are restored with a plant-based brew that also opens his mind to quantum realities and the nature of his true self, giving him remarkable powers, but Liv’s mother, Penelope, is captured. With a small band of allies, Adam has two days to rescue Penelope, stop SINE, and convince all humans of their underlying unity. A.L.F.I.E. offers an action-packed novel of ideas, drawing on correspondences between ancient philosophies and modern physics/computer science. This blend works surprisingly well; some books with similar themes become wooly-headed or overly abstract, but the author always brings the storytelling mojo. Whether describing a cinematic fight scene with cool weapons (like Liv’s whip with an “atomic injector nozzle”) or an inner journey into psychedelic consciousness, A.L.F.I.E. makes his complicated sequences clear to follow and exciting to read. Despite the nearly nonstop action, the story develops its characters nicely, and there’s even time for a sweet romance between Adam and Liv. Altogether, it’s a rich and satisfying confection.
A thrilling superhero journey that remains smart and thoughtful.Pub Date: April 22, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 250
Publisher: ALife Media
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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