A deft and enjoyable satire of the near future.
Domingos offers a speculative novel that looks at the future of American politics driven by artificial intelligence and culture wars.
A presidential debate in the year 2040 features two candidates: Republican PresiBot, an AI created by KumbAI, a startup tech company; and Democrat John Raging Bull, a Lakota chief. The Democrat expresses disdain for “the colonizers’ machine”; the Republican accuses Raging Bull of not being Native American. After a mechanical malfunction causes chaos, Ethan Burnswagger and Arvind Subramanian (KumbAI’s CEO and CTO, respectively) brainstorm strategy and recount how they came to be in this situation. Soon, they’re whisked away to Washington, D.C., to meet with Dave Newald, the successful CEO of Happinet, which uses technology to control people’s emotions; he offers them $350 million for their company. As Raging Bull discusses political strategy with his campaign manager, Naomi Jackson, Arvin pitches PresiBot’s AI system to Mike Granite, another potential investor. Along the way, the KumbAI duo navigates various threats to PresiBot while aiming to keeping him running properly. Externally, they face the public skepticism, media scrutiny, and the unpredictable actions of a political opponent; internally, they face the technological limitations and flaws of PresiBot itself, as well as tensions within their own team about how to manage them. The novel reaches its climax during a follow-up debate; afterward, as one character puts it, “the real roller coaster ride begins.” Domingos’ novel is a fast-paced adventure that satirizes politics and the tech world. He not only succeeds at illustrating the dangers of advanced AI, but also finds just the right element in each scene to keep readers engaged and laughing (while keeping the preachiness to a minimum). The book is full of great lines that highlight technology’s modern influence on humanity, as when Newald comments, “Emotions are just numbers. They can be measured and tweaked like anything else.” Nonetheless, the story is rife with tension, and it never lets readers forget how dangerously close fiction can be to reality.
A deft and enjoyable satire of the near future.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798350963342
Page Count: 226
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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