A clever, if slightly uneven, tale that holds up a funhouse mirror to our modern technological times.
In Pettus’ SF novel, a programmer fears his that job is in jeopardy after the application he’s working on starts mouthing off.
What does it mean when the artificial intelligence project you’re developing suddenly becomes annoyingly argumentative? More importantly, how do you make it stop? That’s the conundrum facing Ralph, Pettus’ hapless hero, as he grapples with an increasing complex world of double-speak and large-scale information manipulation. Ralph isn’t exactly sure what Complexicon Communications does, even though he works there. He isn’t even sure what he’s ordering for lunch at the company’s unnecessarily cryptic cafeteria: What shall it be today, he muses—“colorful, fiber-rich” or “warm, tasty”? All that Ralph knows for sure is the necessity of getting his AI project Chatterbox’s snarky, uncooperative attitude adjusted before his boss, Welcher, finds out about its apparent sentience: “You ought to listen to yourself and see what I put up with,” Chatterbox says at one point. The only character who seems to understand the increasing absurdity of it all is Ralph’s rescue dog; readers are entertainingly privy to the animal’s sometimes-profound inner monologue throughout the yarn: “Domestication is a one-way street with bosses; they want to suppress us into being some sort of homo canis. Dogs run faster, so they put us on a leash. We have better ears, but they make so much noise we can’t hear anything.” Unsurprisingly, Ralph’s dog is also very concerned with the welfare of a pet belonging to another Complexicon employee named Skinner, who’s somehow been taught to provide psychological counseling for tips. These brief sojourns into the dog’s inner monologue make for amusing sidebars. Indeed, they serve a greater purpose, as they also offset the ongoing verbal duels between Chatterbox and Ralph, which, while aiming at absurdist fun, eventually become tedious. As Skinner observes earlier in a conversation with Ralph, “You’re gonna have to deal with an AI that’s been trained by some horse’s ass or by a stable genius, and you still have to figure out which.”
A clever, if slightly uneven, tale that holds up a funhouse mirror to our modern technological times.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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