An enjoyable, post-apocalypse mind romp featuring technologically bred demigods, future Stone Age tribes, and supercilious...
Long after an asteroid nearly erases Earth’s civilization, an artificial intelligence guardian and the archived intellect of a genius must deal with the arrival of large, caterpillarlike alien colonists.
In this sci-fi novel, much-married Albert “Rudy” Rudyard Goldstein earns wealth and esteem for helping heal Earth’s abused environment. Near death, the brilliant but cantankerous fellow rejects having his neural matter uploaded and his mind rendered practically immortal. But after he dies, a doctor and his cousin, an AI expert, do it anyway. Rudy, mildly annoyed, finds himself a disembodied consciousness entrusted to a resourceful, self-sustaining AI computer presence called Mnemosyne (whom he nicknames Nessie). Rudy eventually has a diversion, as an asteroid collision mostly ends terrestrial civilization. A million years later, Rudy, Nessie, and their mound-shaped complex are Earth’s last remnants of advanced technology. The local, primitive tribes worship Nessie as a goddess. In these diminished circumstances, humanity finally has alien first contact with a race called the Jadderbadians. They are tall, segmented, caterpillarlike creatures, not really evil but disposed to regarding Homo sapiens as little more than pets and slaves (if the name Arrogant Worms didn’t already belong to a Canadian band, these beings would have it). When Nessie’s surveillance drones are discovered, the stage is set for a confrontation. Jadderbadian scientist Morticue Ambergrand—slightly more broad-minded than his cohorts—makes Rudy’s acquaintance in a startlingly close way. Raham (Confessions of a Time Traveler, 2015), prolific in generating science books for school-age readers, turns his considerable talent and vision to a grown-up, seriocomic sci-fi narrative. The arch tone should remind readers of Kurt Vonnegut, although Raham is better grounded in exobiology and science and displays a more upbeat outlook for the human (and nonhuman) condition in this engaging tale. That said, hard-sci-fi fans may cock an eyebrow over how the author introduces the planetwide conscious entities, Gaia (for Earth) and Hydra (the corresponding spirit of Jadderbad), who also take active roles. The result is a bit like Arthur C. Clarke’s big-think mind stretchers, laden with wisecracking insults and the occasional dirty joke.
An enjoyable, post-apocalypse mind romp featuring technologically bred demigods, future Stone Age tribes, and supercilious worms.Pub Date: March 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9968819-4-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Penstemon Publications
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
