by Olga Tymofiyeva ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2022
A brief but high-minded speculative tale set in Silicon Valley.
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In Tymofiyeva’s debut SF novel set in Silicon Valley, a would-be entrepreneur gets more than he bargained for while beta-testing a new video game.
In three months, 21-year-old college student Nathanand his best friend Jack will be pitching ideas to San Francisco’s most prestigious tech incubator. Nathan is confident in the strength of their idea—a tracking system to prevent people from stealing shopping carts—but there’s still the matter of the pre-seed funding they need just to compete for the incubator’s support. Luckily, his grandmother has just come to him with an opportunity: She and her university colleagues have designed an online multiplayer virtual reality game “rooted in political philosophy.” If Nathan serves as one of the beta testers for Just City, he could win up to $10,000, depending on his score. Each player designs a society according to their own specifications and then must complete tasks within it. Nathan recruits some friends, then quickly sets up what he thinks will be a meritocratic utopia—and soon, he finds that the game is a lot harder than he thought it would be. Can Nathan adjust his political philosophy enough to take home the prize money? And how will he feel when he gets back out into the real world? Tymofiyeva’s prose is simple but sharply effective. Here, for example, she describes one of Nathan’s incarnations: an unhoused man, suffering from clinical depression, who isn’t good at racking up points: “My character has encounters with the police, gets sick because of malnutrition, takes drugs, and gets beaten up by some punks. There is no help in sight.” The overall tone can be moralizing at times, but thankfully, it effectively pushes past the incidents of the game to address their ramifications for Nathan in the real world. The author’s characters feel somewhat underdeveloped, but readers will likely respond to the book’s consideration of ethics against a background of commerce and technology.
A brief but high-minded speculative tale set in Silicon Valley.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2022
ISBN: 9798365536807
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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