A promising speculative debut that doesn’t feel as if it rolled off the usual robotics assembly line.
In Uddin’s debut SF novel, set in a near-future America, estranged siblings reunite upon discovering that their late mother’s brain has been kept functioning as part of a transhumanism experiment.
In 2030, many jobs in the United States have been taken over by artificial intelligence. Many AI breakthroughs have arisen from the innovations of genius Jay Edison, who’s a divisive figure for siblings Aisha and Sam Malik. Aisha’s public relations position at a massive food corporation (which has had mass layoffs thanks to robotics) places her in the orbit of Edison’s lab. Its “Brain Reinvigoration Project” can keep a brain temporarily functioning after death, providing an imperfect software simulation of the owner’s original personality. This has been done, with Aisha’s permission, with her and Sam’s mother, Maura, an American woman who married a Muslim man from India. Maura’s problematic parenting strongly affected Aisha and long tormented Sam, the latter of whom is now unfocused and drawn to questionable social causes, such as those of Zain, a Chicago drug kingpin who styles himself a neighborhood defender, and the Neo-Luddites, anti–AI agitators strongly influenced by the Unabomber manifesto. Aisha is smarting from her impending divorce from her wife, but she wants Sam to alleviate his own psychic pain by confronting Maura’s brain and meeting Edison in person. However, Sam knows that Maura has long guarded a family secret that would deeply injure Aisha. Despite future-shock trimmings and occasional action thriller elements, Uddin’s novel is never formulaic, focusing mainly on emotions and how relationships are affected by technology. Characters are complicated in intriguing ways; the Ray Kurzweil–like Edison—a cheery, wizened genius who beholds Zain’s empire with Panglossian, optimistic delight—is perhaps the most straightforward figure. A final character-related twist even excuses the story’s potential shortcomings. Other laudable touches are its pleasant avoidance of modern-day topics that other SF writers have pounded into the ground and a plethora of obscure pop-culture references, including a paean to the neglected 1984 film TheIce Pirates.
A promising speculative debut that doesn’t feel as if it rolled off the usual robotics assembly line.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986172002`
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Apperception Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
