A technocratic fantasy of an ideal, AI-assisted world that’s playful, meditative, and poignant, by turns.
An 82-year-old man awakens from “hibernation” to a world governed primarily by an artificial intelligence named Gaïa in Ravasco’s philosophical SF novel about death, technology, and immortality.
Shortly after Leandro Andore began his hibernation (roughly around our present time), AI surpassed human abilities of reasoning and decision-making, and humans gradually ceded authority to Gaïa. After Leandro wakes up, 132 years in the future, his mind is transferred to a 3D-printed body with an embedded, personal AI, which he names Aliana. Aliana guides Leandro around his new world, in which AI has eliminated the need for work, mood-altering substances, and human conflict in general. People spend their days in blissful leisure, making art, enjoying synthetic but delicious food, and having adventures facilitated by highly personalized technology. To some people, this would seem like a utopia, but Leandro has left behind the virtual world of his hibernation—a paradisiacal island that he designed himself, where he lived with avatars of his wife, son, and cats. The tension between the two worlds is further complicated by brief conversations that open each chapter, which suggest that Leandro is being manipulated by an unknown figure. The last act of Ravasco’s novel boasts a couple well-earned plot twists. However, overall, the plotting is rather slow and mostly consists of the protagonist having new experiences that inspire reflections on the 21st century. If a reader isn’t interested in such lengthy excursions, then they may feel the novel drags at times, but others may find it fun and affecting. Leandro is portrayed as an enthusiastic advocate for AI, and the novel mostly explores his perspective on a range of complex issues without admitting AI alternatives. As the author’s note indicates, even the novel itself heavily relies on AI—both for generating the whimsical art at the beginning of each chapter and for the English translation of the text from the French language.
A technocratic fantasy of an ideal, AI-assisted world that’s playful, meditative, and poignant, by turns.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9789083471402
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2024
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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