Cyberpunk meets George Bernard Shaw in this engaging SF tale.
In a future when people live longer by inputting their minds into artificial bodies, an insider in the trade meets a magnificent girl who tries to convince him she is a real human, not a replica.
Lloyd’s latest work of SF takes place in the same universe as his earlier novels, like A Place To Stay Forever (2019), but can be read as a stand-alone. The tale slyly relocates George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion to an SF setting. The year is 2792 in Cascadia, formerly Canada. Ever since the 21st century, technologies pioneered by legendary inventor/hero/godhead LaPorte have allowed elites to prolong their lives indefinitely via inserting their minds into cybernetic “husks” of varying sophistication. More than 700 years in his “LaPortan” exterior, narrator Harry Higgins, though not of the very first wave of would-be immortals, enjoys prestige as a top “carnationist,” creating custom husks of the utmost quality. But Higgins also suffers ennui in his advanced years, more so now since he is at a mental mortal limit (LaPortans could once recharge neurologically but lost the therapy in an ill-defined incident). He finds diversion in collecting techno-novelties. The latest: Kora, a beautiful girl sold to Higgins as a robot (illegally), installed in a deluxe husk. While Kora vainly tries to convince everyone that she's completely human—though she has no memory—Higgins accepts a bet with his friend Melbray that he can pass her off as a masterpiece of carnation at a big LaPortan social event. (By the way, Higgins has a niece named Eliza.) Other works that crossbreed classic material with fantastic fiction tend to either be silly mashups (Lynn Messina’s Little Vampire Women) or YA titles (Marissa Meyer’s Cinder). In this enjoyable story, Lloyd remains faithful to the voice and the sometimes insufferably smug brilliance of Shaw. This on occasion may make reading through Higgins’ thicket of storytelling an arduous expedition, as the material is (of course) verbose, obdurately intellectual, and often repetitious and hectoring. In addition, Higgins may well be an unreliable narrator (he claims chronic victimization by “Big Blue,” a talking bird that may or may not exist), and key elements of the setting go undeveloped. The author may provide more embellishments in future volumes of the series.
Cyberpunk meets George Bernard Shaw in this engaging SF tale.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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