A long and often heady SF tour of humanity that offers a good deal more engaging talk than phaser-fire action.
A troubled young man and woman awaken after two centuries in suspended animation to find themselves in a small, domed technocratic community in Segedy’s SF novel.
In the not-so-far-off year of 2030, patients with life-threatening medical conditions can have their metabolism and other physical functions suspended indefinitely, with the idea that they might be revived and cured in the future. Two people who experienced “Suspended Life” are Jacob Ladder, a computer science college student who suffered severe head trauma in a car mishap, and Emma Fine, a 21-year-old former painter who attempted suicide. In 2230, they’re reanimated to become the newest members of a utopian city-state called Sumpseris. With all their loved ones gone, they adapt to new paradigms. They find that Sumpseris abounds with nanotechnology; scenery shape-shifts agreeably to meet any tastes, and a dropped cup conveniently dematerializes rather than causing a mess. The doctors and other people around Emma and Jacob are friendly, benign embodiments of perfection, true Barbie and Ken archetypes; Emma even discovers, when she screens what passes for 23rd-century pornography, that the people lack sex organs. Human gene manipulation created these passive beings who need not experience poverty, pain, or even death, while androids and artificial intelligences do all the work. The downside is that Sumpseris is all that remains of mankind after an asteroid strike in 2090 turned Earth into a wasteland. As it turns out, the effects of this catastrophe are at the heart of why Jacob and Emma were revived.
Segedy thaws out a venerable SF trope: the “sleeper awakes” plot, in which a character contemporary with the reader is reanimated after induced hibernation and then beholds and comments upon a changed future society. Although the original, action-packed Buck Rogers serial used this gimmick, it’s typically a springboard for lengthy speculative discussions and philosophical discourse—heavier on thought-experimentation than on physicality. Readers here find wordy, witty, and sometimes-spirited dialogues among Jacob, Emma, and their Sumpserian friends (including a few named for real-life figures, such as Carl Sagan and Ray Kurzweil) about what it means to be human, the nature of free will, the purpose of striving for life, and even the driving force of the universe. Segedy doesn’t break the setup’s mold here except to use a metafictional device early on, positing a storyteller behind the scenes. (It’s a device that worked to similar effect in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, not to mention the works of Lemony Snicket.) The hidden narrator, Ike, drops hints of being a superintelligent AI tasked by Sagan with transcribing a history of the human race using guesswork and materials at hand. It’s an interesting move, but it’s one that makes the attenuated novel's epilogue feel like a choose-your-own-ending resolution. Still, despite the lofty intellectual atmosphere, Segedy can’t resist a reference to a former president of the United States with orange hair, small hands, and tiny genitals, among other less-philosophical gags.
A long and often heady SF tour of humanity that offers a good deal more engaging talk than phaser-fire action.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-77592-671-7
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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
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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