A measured and inquisitive speculative mystery with a lyrical soul.
In Johnson’s debut SF novel, an experienced investigator looks into several murders in an era in which serious crime is almost nonexistent.
Decades in the future, Ansel Black is the last detective left on the Rim, a sparsely populated windswept region between the urbanized Everything Sector and the uninhabitable Waste. When it comes to solving crimes, he’s not entirely on his own, though: He has an ANI (short for annotated intelligence) program that can predict the likelihood of any suspect’s guilt as a percentage. There aren’t that many Real Crimes anymore, as most people stay at home inside their cubes and act out their destructive urges in an ANI-run virtual reality known as the Stream. The ruminative Ansel is unsatisfied with both his work and his life in general: “Years as a detective have developed in Ansel something of a sixth sense: specifically, an ability to measure the proximity of a truth that is just out of grasp. It is a sense that has guided him…to surprising confessions. He has but to apply it to something greater.” Then he catches five strange murders. The victims were found shot to death in a religious settlement at the edge of the Waste. ANI’s comprehensive observation network somehow missed how all five of them got there, but evidence suggests each of them arrived on their own. Clearly, someone (or several someones) blacked out ANI’s cameras—a feat that Ansel would normally have considered to be an impossibility. To figure out how these people died, he will have to rely on an antiquated solution: good old-fashioned detective work. The ensuing investigation, which involves clues hidden in cryptic paintings of children watched over by a backward moon, soon becomes a personal quest into the true purpose of ANI—and of Ansel himself.
In its themes and content, this novel is reminiscent of the works of Philip K. Dick. In the world of the novel, technology has reached the singularity—the Great Merger, as it’s called—rendering humankind largely obsolete. The slightly old-fashioned Ansel, who fetishizes the pre-Merger “Classic Era” and writes his musings by hand in a diary, makes for a thoughtful foil to the dystopian world in which he lives. Over the course of the novel, Johnson’s tidy prose effectively captures the melancholic weirdness of the desertlike Rim, a place of ruins and abandoned objects: “Ansel leans into the dead Rim atmosphere as the breeze pulls softly towards the Waste. His longjacket ruffles sideways past the splintered framework of some structure that has lost its identity. He scans the rubble with his wrist enhancement and ANI provides her empty synopsis of the area’s history.” As in Dick’s work, the story eschews a tight mystery structure and doesn’t generate a great deal of narrative momentum. Ansel’s philosophical journal entries are frequently excerpted, and his personal struggle for meaning and purpose provides the book’s true narrative arc. Fans of cerebral SF will likely devour this offering and eagerly await Johnson’s future books.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1087999920
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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