Seattle slackers accidentally gain superhuman powers of perception and space-time manipulation, causing an entirely different group of superior beings to wonder what exactly to do about them.
Taylor’s debut may sport a gonzo title, but it’s more like the sophisticated sci-fi satire of Kurt Vonnegut, mildly tweaked for Pacific Northwest sensibilities. Outside Seattle, five young college dropouts enjoy the slacker lifestyle—smoking dope, fiddling with computers, and working barista-level jobs. One of them, Uli, is a rogue biochemical scientist with a habit of experimenting secretly on his friends. His latest experiment—lacing their marijuana with a fancy offshoot of Ecstasy as a way to grow fresh brain tissue—goes too well. Suddenly, their brain waves amped enough to create radio interference, Tony, Kaitlin, Astrid, and Alan possess superhuman powers of perception, telepathy, bilocation, materialization, and dematerialization—things that might be considered dangerous if these youths were more than latter-day hippies with short attention spans and no ambition. Nevertheless, they catch the attention of virtually immortal, normally invisible cosmic entities, the ones who inspire legends of angels, leprechauns, faeries, tricksters, and Native American spirit-animals (including the assassin rabbit). These various supernatural, virtually immortal beings meet with the “new people” (as they call the newly gifted slackers)—whose godlike powers may just exceed their own—to assess what kind of threat the kids pose. Meanwhile, in addition to numerous (albeit never belabored) sci-fi inside jokes and Starfleet references, Taylor throws the bewildered reader several semiconnected plotlines: a mildly Ray Bradbury/Jack Finney–esque paranormal traveling circus; an insidious computer virus in the process of taking over and controlling all data technology; and illegal dumping of industrial waste (by one of the god-kids’ parents) that comes alive and evolves into a golemlike “purple dirt yeti” creature arbitrarily named Mike. By the end, most of these story threads are left dangling, suggesting either that Taylor has a planned sequel up his Seahawks-jersey sleeve or that Washington state slacker types, even granted possibly limitless superpowers, would rather just go surfing, have sex, and chill.
Postmodern ironic gods must be crazy—or just a bit lazy—in this wry, absurd, yet sophisticated sci-fi.
Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-30424-2
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Impossibly Small Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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