An exciting, if somewhat familiar, tale of high-tech guerrilla warfare.
In Hartle’s SF trilogy starter, a troubled future America is invaded by advanced warrior robots and AIs controlled by a technocratic tycoon.
As the story opens, the United States in severe social and economic decline. Crime and poverty run rampant, partially as a side effect of many people losing their jobs to ubiquitous robots. President Jim Forester, finding neither Republicans nor Democrats willing to do anything to alter the nation’s downward spiral, makes a fateful alliance with technocrat tycoon Travis Eckhart to deploy thousands of enforcement robot warriors and scouts around the country. But the megalomaniacal Eckhart takes the plan much further, toppling Forester from power and sending his lethal bots on a mission of occupation, sabotaging electrical grids and putting citizens in internment camps as a prelude to a high-tech totalitarian society. In an unnamed city, several friends, all recent high school graduates, suddenly find themselves cut off from their families and fending for survival with other holdouts as pitiless armored bots patrol the wrecked streets. Fortunately, the young people find allies. Among them are Skip, a well-sequestered hacker, and Amira Fahmi, who, as a disaffected member of Eckhart’s inner circle, helped concoct this nightmarish takeover and has inside intel. Hartle, whose biography boasts movie special-effects work, makes his debut here with a seemingly storyboarded-for-the-cameras tale of techno-terror. Genre fans will certainly have come across this sort of story before. However, the action in this novel moves at a fast clip, and unlike Daniel H. Wilson’s superficially similar Robopocalypse novels, it has no pretentiously philosophical sidebars about artificial-intelligence ethics and android souls slowing things down. The conquering bots conjured here are effectively shown to be impersonally mindless, if cunningly coordinated, automatons, and the story’s emotional content remains a function of the human characters—at least in this go-round; the open ending emphasizes that this book is the first installment in a Bot Trilogy.
An exciting, if somewhat familiar, tale of high-tech guerrilla warfare.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2022
ISBN: 979-8423896690
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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