A nuanced, captivating examination of what the near future might have in store.
This SF debut novel sees the higher-ups of a tech super-company grapple with ethical concerns while hostile forces scheme to break the behemoth’s monopoly.
The Artemis biotech company, based in San Francisco, has its origins in medical advancements—processes that target areas of the brain to achieve sight for the blind, hearing for the deaf, movement for paraplegics, and a cure for drug addiction. But by 2042, Artemis has used its mastery of neural pathways to expand into the more profitable realm of “casting”—an intimate sensory media that allows people to broadcast their experiences to paying customers. While co-founder Peter Graham had the best of intentions in pushing for this development, a confluence of corporate, governmental, and global interests has brought Artemis to a precarious ethical position. Casts come not only with subliminal advertising, but also a secret layer of “embeds”—deeply buried tenets designed to nudge users toward or away from particular behaviors. Such force-feeding from up high seems the tradeoff for having vetted equipment and regulated content. While Katherine Tanaka, Artemis’ head of Corporate Communications, has largely made peace with the practice, her boyfriend, Harbrinder Singh, has been working behind her back to promote an ad-free but unregulated “OpenCast” alternative. Will Artemis continue as a conflicted force for good or will its dark secret undo the company and its founders? Mitchell employs straightforward, clear prose in detailing Artemis’ rise to prominence and credible future predicated on modern trends. While the chapters carry the names of their viewpoint players, these protagonists tend somewhat to be ciphers through which Mitchell breaks down the larger character of society itself. One of the novel’s strengths is that it eschews authorial agendas in favor of gray areas. Thus, both sides act reprehensibly but with laudable or at least clear motives. Even the autistic coder Henry is driven to push his own reactionary ideals—the clandestine “JesusNet”—on others in part because he objects to Peter’s having promoted progressive values (including “homosexuality is not a sin”). Unfortunately, the story sometimes lacks impetus and ends rather abruptly. Nonetheless, the exploration of a key concept is compelling: monopolized security or free will? Readers will find plenty here to mull over.
A nuanced, captivating examination of what the near future might have in store.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798992839913
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
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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