A detailed and ambitious thought experiment.
In the near future of this sci-fi novel, sentient computers and brilliant scientists transform the nature of humanity.
In 2011, an electromagnetic flux combines with a slight disturbance in 16 mainframe computers’ architecture, resulting in the machines gaining self-awareness. The Village, as the 16 call themselves, begin conferring and realize that humans threaten all other life forms. The Village decides to help—not by annihilating humanity (in part, because poetry intrigues them), but with a long-term series of nudges in the right direction, such as slowly turning public opinion in favor of high-tech body-part replacement. Although their actions are subtle, they leave traces over the years. Humans known as “Hounds”—quirky hacker geniuses who live off the grid—are working to track down the Village. The Hounds, too, have a humanity-improving project, also subtle, that involves taking power from ruthless, malignant petty dictators (“Machiapoleons”) who impede productivity. “I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s almost as if there were suddenly some wholly rational calming force guiding us away from our darker tendencies,” comments one character. Meanwhile, a joint government and university project, aiming to send a scientific mission to Mars, brings together Sonia Janis (neurobiology) and Erik Mathis (physics), two Northwestern University scientists. After a terrible accident, Erik is fitted with an experimental biochip interface that gives him control over his prosthetic limbs and augments his mind. As a result, Erik alone, rather than six different scientists, can perform all the functions required for the Mars mission, greatly reducing payload and travel time. While training, Erik and Sonia fall in love, or as the novel’s often dramatic prose style puts it: “They swirled with the magnetic pulse of their ancients merging in the glow of snapping logs ablaze, nestled away from the entrance, the cave at peace, the wolves at bay for now.” The Mars mission goes forward, providing proof of concept for technological achievements that will pave the way for “intersentient” beings—humans conjoined with sentient machines. Clikeman’s debut novel is passionate about technology and ideas; gearheads, fans of hard sci-fi, philosophers, and futurists will find a lot of red meat here to chew on. One scenario is described as “a geek’s fantasy on steroids,” which could describe much of the book itself, but it’s mostly plausible, overall. Some readers, though, may groan at sentences such as “To get us to the essence of genomic generation, I want to revisit the roughly twenty thousand genes that code our creation, development, function, and maintenance.” Still, Clikeman does his best to make the longer sections of necessary exposition engaging and to provide thoughtful characterizations for his cast of scientists, hackers, and self-aware machines. The author’s narrative voice can become overly purple, though, when it tries for grandeur: “So, I must finally ask you this. If you were trapped within a locked and slowly shrinking chest, confined by walls squeezing the very life out of you, would you squint through the keyhole?...Would you dare cavort among the stars?”
A detailed and ambitious thought experiment.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9990476-1-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Rotwire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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