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
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION
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