This perceptive take on the reality TV–in-the-future premise deserves boffo ratings.
Bruno’s SF novel follows the struggling inhabitants of a dilapidated space ark who are unwitting players in a cruel, hidden-camera reality show.
In the year 2450, the Ignis is an aging, ramshackle spaceship fashioned from an asteroid and presumably carrying approximately 10,000 refugees from a destroyed Earth to a colony world in the Tau Ceti star system. Every fragile resource, including birth, is highly regulated, so it’s impressive that a girl called Mission, conceived outside regulations and genetic assignments, survives to adulthood and blends in. There’s a bigger secret, however: Humankind, back on Earth, is still around. Although beset by floods, millions on 25th-century “High Earth” enjoy an idyllic lifestyle featuring robots, virtual-reality technology, and other media entertainment. The Ignis, it turns out, is still in orbit around Earth, providing a continuous hidden-camera feed for Ignis: Live, a 50-year-old reality TV show transmitting the real-time lives (and deaths) of the ship’s desperate inhabitants, including Mission. Asher Reinhart, chief director of content for the show, has watched Mission’s struggles and developed a strong emotional attachment to her. When he learns that a disaster is planned for the ship to boost sagging viewership, he intervenes to protect Mission from harm. This transgression backfires, putting Mission in even more danger and sending Asher into the anarchic Outskirts zone. Bruno is not the first, nor will he be the last, SF author to address reality television, but he mines rich veins of meaning in this stand-alone work. He also doesn’t skimp on the action, which includes grotesque cyborgs, but he also instills deep thought into his premise. There are familiar themes regarding the greed and ego of media elite and the fickle flukiness of celebrity, but the heart of the tale is an exploration of the contrast between the tech-saturated lifestyles of High Earth’s people and the hardscrabble ordeals that the Ignis’ courageous inhabitants encounter. The author also scores points for not aping the landmark twist of Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 virtual-reality novel Simulacron-3, which also involved puppet masters monitoring a synthetic society.
This perceptive take on the reality TV–in-the-future premise deserves boffo ratings.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949890-72-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Aethon Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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