A heartfelt array of speculative SF tales.
Croal’s short stories ponder the human condition as it might exist in the future.
The thread connecting the short stories in this SF compilation is the presence of post-human and para-human culture in the future. When artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and robots overstep the operating parameters set by their human users, the results may be beneficial—or sinister. The title tale concerns a surgical breakthrough using “data node” implants to resurrect patients from devastating brain-injury comas. But along with this “AfterLiving” comes the temptation, particularly for ambitious parents, to secretly enhance the unwitting patients’ abilities. Thus, young car-crash survivor Nara find herself featured in a televised music show displaying singing talent she never knew she had. The narrator of the opening story “Patchwork Girls” is a beautiful entertainment-industry android, built to suffer violence, even murder, in films and live-stage productions; medical miracles make her good as new after every stunt. She is supposed to feel no pain or malaise, but she does (“maybe she’s dying for real this time. Maybe this is the end. There is some relief in that thought”). In “Hush Little Sister,” sentient holograms called Shimmers replace deceased family members, and these artificial ghosts bring comfort and solace to the household survivors (supposedly). In “Better Self,” retinal implants, mandatory for elite employees in the big-tech industries, bring nonstop bombardments of advertising. The solution only leads to exponential commercial intrusion. A few stories flirt with supernatural futures; “The Rift Between Us” posits a region of space in which the spirits of humans who die off-planet remain aware and available for melancholy reunions with the living. Some stories are “flash fiction” vignettes of only a few paragraphs. Croal’s prose is smooth as touch-screen glass and does not submerge readers in abstruse science or techno-jargon; still, genre fans must be quick on the uptake to recognize virtual reality, cryogenics, and other SF concepts. This collection commendably addresses deep emotions in addition to apocalyptic shocks and awe.
A heartfelt array of speculative SF tales. (science fiction)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781959565468
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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