Formidably weird fantasy about the process of growing up, from an author perhaps best known for his resplendent translations of Stanislaw Lem. In western Pennsylvania live the Zimmerman family: Aliens, or mutants from the future, who possess strange powers and devices—they conceal themselves by controlling key figures in the community. But when ten-year-old Christopher starts boasting of his exploits at school, Mother decides that he must be scooped out- -permanently deprived of his magic/psi powers and turned into an ordinary straight-A student and model citizen . . . just like his brother, Brian. In desperation, Christopher flees to Gramps, who similarly is resisting being banished to a retirement home in Florida. Together, the pair go journeying through space, time, and probability—but Mother still pursues them with relentless fanaticism. There's one chance, Gramps thinks: His old friend and mentor, Panda Ray, will be able to help them, but Christopher will end up as an entirely different person. Still, having little choice, Christopher embarks on a further jaunt even odder than his first, with implacable Mother yet to face at the end of it all. Tirelessly inventive but amorphous, with humorous intentions that never quite break through into real amusement: impressive, yet difficult to approach. Rather like . . . yes, like Stanislaw Lem.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14387-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.
A post-apocalyptic—and pre-apocalyptic—debut.
It’s 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. She doesn’t love her job as a production assistant—she helps publishers make specialty Bibles—but it’s a steady paycheck. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn’t go with him, so she’s in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Victims don’t die immediately. Instead, they slide into a mechanical existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. These zombies aren’t out hunting humans; instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart. Retail workers fold and refold T-shirts. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. A handful of people seem to be immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. The connection between existence before the End and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. The fevered aren’t all that different from the factory workers who produce Bibles for Candace’s company. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones; Candace is only able to complete the contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn’t mind too much if its workers die from lung disease. This is a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. This is Ma’s first novel, but her fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. She knows her craft, and it shows. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. She’s sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever. Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience.
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26159-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Scientific fiction enclosed in a frame — wanderer meets a tattooed man whose images foretell the future, leaving a space to preview the destiny of the viewer. Here is an open circuit on ideas, which range from religion, to racial questions, to the atom bomb, rocket travel (of course), literature, escape to the past, dreams and hypnotism, children and their selfish and impersonal acceptance of immediate concepts, robots, etc. Note that here the emphasis is on fiction instead of science, and that the stories — in spite of space and futurities — have some validity, even if the derivations can be traced. Sample The Veldt, or This Man, or Fire Balloons, or The Last Night In the World for the really special qualities. A book which is not limited by its special field.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1950
ISBN: 0062079972
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1950
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