A riveting speculative dystopian collection that makes compelling arguments for radical queer resistance in every future.
Six interconnected short stories serve as windows into Hayslett’s speculative futuristic world.
This collection of forward-looking stories chronologically spans from 2067 to 2980 and stretches geographically from the “former California” to the moon, Saturn, and outer space. Hayslett introduces readers to a Black lesbian activist named Resistance who’s leading a campaign of land reclamation against a space-destined billionaire, two friends reuniting on the moon in a love affair forbidden by company hierarchies, and a group of clones achieving community at a cost, among other futurist stories. In the lead story, “Reclamation,” CEO billionaire Graham Sheff joins “the world’s most important people [who] live in orbit now.” Those who are “too poor, too brown, too sick, and too queer” are left trying to rebuild and survive on a broken Earth. But Resistance is plagued with a malignant toothache that whispers its name and corrupts her memories. In the next story, “Barriers,” the aforementioned CEO grapples with his past as he encounters an alien life force “not designed for confinement.” Their mission is “to flow and understand” the spaceship’s occupants, but their curiosity is met with cruelty. In “Centipede’s,” two former friends, the Historian Tigre and Contract grunt Snake, reunite; their dormant love blossoms under Sheff’s rigidly enforced company hierarchy. In “Battery,” Black lesbian scientist Chantral is training for interdimensional travel but is haunted by a woman she only half remembers. This is a fascinating and timely set of speculative science fiction tales: Hayslett is a masterful storyteller whose complex moral scenarios are made accessible by the human and nonhuman relationships at their center. The collection taps into the contemporary zeitgeist by thematically exploring the ethics of off-world travel, social hierarchies, and how society can build a community to resist capitalist structures without simplifying Hayslett’s position for the reader. This collection is highly readable and one that fans of Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Nalo Hopkinson will no doubt relish.
A riveting speculative dystopian collection that makes compelling arguments for radical queer resistance in every future.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781963869347
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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