A sharply drawn satire set in a broken future economy.
In Shapiro’s debut speculative novel, an emasculated man seeks redemption in the shadow economy.
In 2035, times are tough for a lot of people, including Raf Vella, a downsized estate planner turned stay-at-home dad (though he dislikes the term). He moonlights as a delivery man for specialty items—which, due to shortages, now encompass anything beyond the barest staples—which he picks up at a warehouse called the Depot. One night, Raf stumbles across an underground boxing match going on at the back of Depot, and he can’t help but be taken in by the high wagers and prizes. He steps into the ring and, unexpectedly, comes away a winner. The match provides his entry into the Real Deal Economy, a black market for all sorts of things, created by legal loopholes and Congressional gridlock. “We’re basically modern-day moonshiners-gone-corporate,” explains one RDE-er. Raf wants to become a Broker, someone who connects people and goods within the RDE and makes the kind of money that has become all but impossible to earn in the normal economy. If he can do that, maybe he can earn back the respect of his wife and provide for his daughter the way he wants to. To become a Broker, however, Raf will have to climb the dangerous ladder of the RDE. Is the money he might eventually make worth the things he’ll have to do to get there? Shapiro’s prose expertly sketches Raf’s world, which feels simultaneously alien and familiar. Though the dystopian premise is hardly unique, the details of Raf’s grim near-future are inventive and fresh (the precipitator of this dystopia, intriguingly, is a corrupted infrastructure that unexpectedly leads to kleptocracy.) Here the author describes television in the post-streaming world: “Advertising had basically dried up, and not enough people were willing or had the bucks to pay subscription fees. The whole industry had been replaced by a blizzard of so-called ‘user-generated content’ that consisted mainly of homemade videos, crudely-made amateur dramas and pirated copies of vintage TV shows.” It’s a quick, immersive tale that leaves its reader sated.
A sharply drawn satire set in a broken future economy.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781639888979
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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