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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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